Dr David Vessey

There are no cuts on the table beyond a review for certain programmes that was already in place. The UCU seems to want an extended guarantee beyond this year.

Nicked a couple of my articles it seems. Here’s hoping my shocking grammar brings it down from within …

Fair enough!

Sounds similar to our current predicament. What uni is this?

Does anyone know what the acronym VSO meant in government parlance from the 1930s? It’s a Home Office file on a foreign national’s scientific research, so the latter part is possibly Science Officer. The report makes VSO out to be an individual rather than an organisation.

I don’t understand the figures in this story. Regrettable though it is, £16.5 million has already been saved from VSS, so there’s no way that there will be 1,000 additional job losses. The UCU are just scoring political points as usual, and I’m as critical of our management as the next person.

Unfortunately not a decision based on an objective analysis, and there are other resources on the chopping block.

This is a problem of how we conflate engineering and science. Students using LLMs to write is like building a robot to lift weights for you at the gym. The point of lifting the weights is for your training, not because weights need lifting

The Donny DNA is strong. Would certainly kick the arse of Cambridge.

Hang on, have you been a fellow Doncastrian all this time without me realising?

Very, very late to this particular party (it’s not my field in fairness), but McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is every bit as great as everyone says it is. A masterpiece.

Our morale is in the toilet. It’s a masterclass in torpedoing performance.

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The excitement when the metrics spot that someone has cited your article, only to find it was me in a subsequent piece indulging in flagrant self-promotion.

And finally for now, the equally curious case of Truth in the early Cold War: doi.org/10.1177/0022...

First-hand Accounts? Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons as Moscow Correspondents in the 1930s Previous studies on Moscow correspondents in the 1930s have prioritised the work of individual reporters over the infrastructure that actually conditioned how Western journalists could operate. Thi...

This next article is on the Sisyphean task of Moscow correspondents in the 1930s: doi.org/10.1080/1461...

Anti-Bolshevism and the periodical press in interwar Britain: the case of the Saturday Review, 1933–6 Abstract. Using the example of the Saturday Review under the ownership of Lady Houston, this article explores how anti-Bolshevism was constituted in interw

Very grateful to see so many new followers. On the off chance that you’re kicking your heels on Saturday evening, here’s some links to my recent work. This first piece is on the frankly bonkers Saturday Review in the 1930s: doi.org/10.1093/hisr...

I’d like to be added please!

Too little, too late and pleases no one. If it’s a sticking plaster pending more serious surgery then fair enough, but I’m not hopeful.

Not historiography but the first Royal Commission on the Press might have something on N. Ireland. There’s also Coglan’s report from 1936, but I don’t remember it having circulation for local papers.

Same. With a quill pen and calligraphy.

Not a great surprise at that point in 1945 when he’s still in the late ’Uncle Joe’ phase. And there was always a tendency to separate Stalin to some degree from the worst tyrannies of the Bolsheviks in the 1930s.

Delighted to finally share this, and open-access too! Journal of Contemporary History, 'Speaking Truth to a Foreign Power: Anti-Bolshevism and Truth in the Early Cold War, 1945–53' - David Vessey, 2024 t.co/amDBE5Hv5f

Going deep on the Morrison ‘coup’ that never was?

I do this all the time. Tomorrow I’ll think it’s a pile of stinking turd 😐

The proportion of National Archives users who hit the vino at lunch is hugely impressive.

I’m not saying that my writing is becoming too prolix, but the one chapter I intended to write on this particular theme is currently four.

Bashed out over 2,500 words today. Some of it might even be printable. Taking the small wins where I can #booktravails

Starting my day by describing George Bernard Shaw as puerile. How’s your day going? 😎

In the latest predictable peer review is broken update, an article I submitted in October is still sat on its virtual shelf awaiting the appointment of reviewers. Every single journal is like this at the moment.

The tone is puzzling. He swings between portraying Napoleon as megalomaniacal tyrant and lovesick puppy, with a sprinkle of Norman Wisdom thrown in. Now that I think about it, this sounds more entertaining than it was.