Tim Hannigan

It's the best thing ever, isn't it? (I'll confess that I do "The Red Wheelbarrow" with my students mainly just to be able to show them this the following week...)

Up there with Mary Ruefle's "Red"...

Reader, they replied to apologise for the fact that their "tailored book positioning" service was not applicable in my case... (The initial AI-generated personalised pitch was particularly cringey.)

Prompting people to go off and read other related books is always a key aspiration for me in my writing, so I'm delighted by this! (And Rowse is very readable...)

A nicely circuitous route! I'm genuinely delighted to hear this - the idea of writing books that encourage people to read other books is very important to me!

Ah, Rowse is a great place to have ended up at the bottom of that rabbithole, and yes - hugely readable. (Actually, I generally find mid-c20th academics have a much more engaging prose style and better ability to communicate than many of their counterparts today...)

The Guardian or Wuthering Heights? (Genuine question!)

TFW the publisher makes out like "being selected" for the Waterstones February preorder promotion is some kind of big deal, then you open Instagram and literally every nonfiction author with a book out this year is posting the same thing... Anyway, FEB26 is the discount code for preordering stuff...

Nice quote on footpaths from John Burroughs. He was thinking of the USA at the time, but he could have had other places in mind...

Just a reminder - the #KeepIrelandOpen AGM is tomorrow from 11am in Tailors' Hall Dublin, open to anyone interested in protecting and improving access to the countryside in Ireland. I'll be speaking in the afternoon, a sneak preview of some of the ideas in my forthcoming book, #ThePathlessLand.

Ooh! You have a travel writing and empire module! Jealous! (Although I do just about manage to make every module at least partly a travel writing and empire module...)

Have been listening to the Observer's podcast on #TheSaltPath scandal recently, and then ran into this c18th poem, part of the furious Irish response to the notorious A Tour in Ireland in 1775 by Richard Twiss ("Let Every One Piss On Lying Dick Twiss"). Travel writers, eh? Plus ça change!

(I've cited him in the intro to a book I'm just doing the final edits on, and Journey Through Britain was one of the key inspirations back at the planning stage, so it's a perfect time to go back to it - thanks for the prompt!)

Right - that's decided it, it's time for a reread!

Very fond of this book. He manages to maintain a breezy tone throughout even when, as you note, getting rather dark at and plainly describing a journey that was thoroughly miserable at times...

There's a family legend about M.T. Hannigan ordering an electioneering Churchill off his doorstep with an earful about the deployment of the Black and Tans the following year. I've always taken it with a pinch of salt, but here's proof of a firm editorial line at least! 2/2

Delighted to find the newspaper my great-grandfather, M.T. Hannigan, ran - The Dundee Catholic Herald - describing Winston Churchill as a "dangerous, double-dealing, oily-tongued adventurer" in 1921. 1/

For anyone interested in improving access to the countryside in #Ireland, the #KeepIrelandOpen AGM is coming up in Dublin next month, 14 Feb - open to all interested in finding out what they do. I'll be speaking, a sneaky preview of some of the things covered in my forthcoming book #ThePathlessLand

Further to this, I'm going to start paying attention to Turnitin scores again - just not in the old way. I'm now going to jump on those with a similarity score of *zero*. If you have actually engaged with the literature, that score ought to be impossible. It's probably a good indicator of AI use.

I should add that my own students are actually largely wonderful - brilliantly creative young people who really do want to study literature and learn how to write. But, my god, the general picture is bleak...

Yes, absolutely this. The first graduates who have got through college without *ever* having to deploy basic research reading, critical thinking and argumentation are coming through into the jobs market right about now - and there's an absolute flood coming after them.

It struck me today that I never even look at the Turnitin "similarity score" any more - that I'd be *glad* to find a bit of old-fashioned *human* plagiarism. Then it struck me that many students wouldn't even know *how* to do copy-and-paste plagiarism any more. Where the hell do we go from here? 2/2

Anyone else teaching in higher education struggling to maintain a sense of purpose these days? The experience of marking student essays has changed utterly for the worse in a few short years. Thanks to AI, it's now a thing of constant doubt, suspicion and low-level resentment. 1/2

Book titles go in italics short story titles go in quote marks colon not semicolon here book titles go in italics short story titles go in quote marks colon not semicolon here book titles go in italics... - the small repetitive pleasures of knowing the DIDN'T use ChatGPT! #AmMarking

Ah, wonderful! If it had to be somewhere other than Penwith I'd very gladly choose Bodmin Moor!

Ah, thank you! Granite is the best of lodestones, the best rock one could live amongst!

(Thanks, too, to all the people who borrowed old guidebooks to India, Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia etc. - I'll think of you when I treat myself to a flat white...)

#PLR day, and for the first time ever one of my "proper books" has beaten all the out-of-date guidebooks on my list of publications as top earner! Thanks to the 883 people who borrowed The Granite Kingdom from libraries last year - I will be taking the family out for a nice dinner on the proceeds!

The Ladybird books, of course! Weirdly, I also find Marguerite Patten's Cookery in Colour adjacent to these books in my mental library!

I don't think the powerful formative impact of boos of this sort is discussed enough. The Long man Animal Encyclopedia was another key one for me.