Roger Luckhurst

I was going to post about what a great idea it is to impose further surcharges and taxes on universities at the point they are collapsing, but here’s an emergency fluffy kitten instead

Help Darran buy bookhaus! If they can raise another ten grand, someone will match it, and then it’s spitting distance…

So this is what ex-editors of The Spectator do in their retirement #quitenichefortheNeckarValley

Chapter 18, Rip Tide:

RIP Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, who put a character in one of her late novels who was a rubbish academic who worked on trauma called Richard Luckhurst

Supernatural Tales 59 The 59th issue of the long-running magazine offers a wide range of stories by British and American authors. From an anecdote told in a Yorkshire hair salon to a worried academic wandering an East Angl...

I have a new short story out in this issue, ‘On Dunwich Beach’, a title that mashes up Matthew Arnold, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft. Support indie publishers!

At the European Parliament in Strasbourg and absolutely furious we can no longer complain about having to pay for this carpet.

Supersized stick insect discovered in high-altitude trees in Australia

No one tells you as you bumble along in your 50s that one day you’ll wake up and you’ll realise that you don’t really know who Katy Perry actually is.

Amazingly, one of my short stories made it into this anthology — thanks to @saltpublishing.com and the editor @nicholasroyle.bsky.social for picking it up. You can preorder at discount of 25% to the end of July

It is the season for autoreply email messages, but I still got caught out by 'I am currently OOO.' For at least 20 seconds I wondered whether I'd ever be likely to say 'I am currently an object-oriented ontologist'

At least 3 maverick cop shows premiered yesterday, but I’m watching Unmaverick Cop, where in a single take over 4 hours Stephen Graham fills in the paperwork for a faulty rear break light

In memoriam, I will be making a cooked breakfast in the style of Ozzy Osbourne this morning

Graveyards: A History of Living With the Dead by Roger Luckhurst Luckhurst (Gothic) glides through the long history of how humanity has dealt with its dead in this wide-ranging account. He divi...

“An entertaining overview of the cultural life of death.” @theprofrog.bsky.social’s illustrated history of mortuary culture, Graveyards, is reviewed in @publisherswkly.bsky.social:

Giving this talk 1st October at Highgate Cemetery chapel to launch my Graveyards book!

www.brucewoodcockboxer.co.uk Always amazed to be reminded my PhD supervisor was the son of the Heavyweight Champion Boxer Bruce Woodcock!

My key traumatic cultural returns from that period are Terry & June on TV and tortured word punning by Frank Muir/Dennis Norden on Radio 4. Triggered!

READ THE STATS PEOPLE

The morning:

I’m hearing that, to avoid any future controversy on #Masterchef, the new presenters will be Boris Johnson and Liz Truss

Does this mean that whenever Macron comes to London Starmer has to go to Paris, do that tragically they can never meet again?

Rewatching Twin Peaks The Return and increasingly admire Dougie’s approach to office admin

Poor old Pig Organs, one of the best punk drummers in the late 70s

In a tea and cakeshop that has quite a heavy ‘anteroom to an early bourgeois death’ vibe.

New board members for Tony Blair Institute announced

Happy birthday to Eva Marie Saint, incredibly 101 today

Covers pretty much anything in 2025

Still have the thermometer the university union gave out that indicated the legal limits of when it was either too hot or too cold to continue to work. Today it has hit the level ‘Too hot to think about Kantian aesthetics’.

Simple B-movie 90 minute pleasures for hot nights: the near wordless No One Will Save You