Justin Pearce

Just realised that the song that I have spent 30+ years hearing as 'kiss from the rose on the grave' is actually 'rose on the grey'.

Interesting how 'lammas' appears in this, as it did with a completely different derivation & meaning in your post a few days ago. Having spent a few years in Cambridge I thought of Lammas Land as did @nhwise.bsky.social - now wondering if that's about sheep or about bread.

And kind of appropriate for a country that fought its way out of the best federation in history.

I lived in England for years and never quite figured this one out. And I have never lived in the US. But doesn't the US meaning of 'fancy' (which has little in common with the UK meaning) have some semantic overlap with 'posh'?

By the same logic, 'The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Limits of the Law' would be the perfect name for an anarcho-syndicalist terror group.

The point where information passes back & forth between media & academia is troublesome. Journalists assume academics write with authority. Academics assume media are a repository of facts.

I was struck by Change UK, which from its very inception presented itself as the party of continuity.

Interesting use of the word 'practicable'.

Since my Slavic vocabulary is minimal, when we were there a Czech friend used Pramen Labe to demonstrate how Staropramen means the same as Urquell.

So Xanadu was actually in Dresden and the Mongols actually got a bit further west than history records.

A sign indicating Labske Bouda at the source of the Elbe in a snowy landscape.

Been there too - and didn't get sunburnt.

The first element of each pair would actually make a plausible pairing.

'There's an arrogance to the way they move around the city': is it time for digital nomads like me to leave Lisbon? Like so many others, I moved from London to Portugal’s capital for the sun, lifestyle – and the tax break. But as tensions rise with struggling locals, many of us are beginning to wonder whether we’re...

Having read the article I have no doubt the answer to the (rhetorical?) question in in the headline an emphatic yes.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Oval?

A bit like the German formula for naming animals: [unlikely modifier] + [name of another possibly unrelated animal].

It's nearly 11pm in departures at Rome airport. I should have been on the plane 3 hours ago. The experience is redeemed by a free-to-use piano. Everyone who's played is pretty good and even if there's an odd wrong note, it's such a relief from the blandness & monetisation you expect at an airport.

Because some recent flights were booked for me by a Norwegian travel company, I now automatically get the company's security alerts. I have been warned about pro-Palestine demos, heatwaves and now Pride marches. It's a dangerous world out there.

When I started making kombucha I knew the word 'scoby' sounded familiar but couldn't remember why. Just picked up a copy of The Heart of the Matter, and remembered. (I've often felt I lived in a Graham Greene novel, but this is a new dimension.)

Reminds me when of I was in Krakow as a mature (43) doctoral student with a bona fide student card. The ticket office at the castle refused to give me the student discount.

In Italy. Getting by with a mashup of three Romance languages in which I have varying degrees of competence (Portuguese, French, Spanish) and pronouncing it like Lady Gaga in House of Gucci. I guess this is Bad Romance.

It could have scheduled a zoom call.

If you're at #ecas2025 in Prague & have a Southern Africa paper you'd like to publish, senior editor @justinpearce.bsky.social & chair Rebekah Lee are here. We'll be at the Meet the Editors event Friday 17.30-19.00, at the T&F stand in the Arts Faculty 3rd floor. Or message us via the ECAS website.

In Prague for #ecas2025. Ana Santos & I organised Friday's double panel HIS333 'The contested memory of anti-colonial & post-colonial wars'. Sessions are at 09.00 & 15.00. I present at 15.00 with Daria Zelenova on our coauthored paper 'Soviet & Angolan veterans’ memories of the Angolan conflict'.

Not recorded but the article will be out soon. I can send you the MS if you're interested.

Enjoyed talking about the relationship between MPLA soldiers & ANC liberation fighters in 1980s Angola: more difficult than the official declarations of solidarity would suggest. I argue it fuelled the 1984 MK mutiny.
The article will be published in @jsas-journal.bsky.social early next year.

Angola after dos Santos: An anthology on continuity and change As Angola celebrates its 50th anniversary as an independent nation, it is timely to provide an assessment of the state of political, s...

In Luanda for the launch of this edited volume on #Angola after Dos Santos, produced in record time in Portuguese & English with chapters by Angolan & foreign scholars. Both versions in the link. My chapter is on the politics of public memory 50 years after independence.
www.cmi.no/publications...

Don't have figures to hand, but few actual troops. Many more military advisers who circulated through. Far from 'invading', it's by now well established that the Soviets had to be begged by the Cubans to lend a hand.

Hope the story involves Wagner Group mercenaries.

I don't post much on Twitter any more - but number of likes and retweets on Twitter and Bluesky for the same post show that the other place is still the place to be for Africa-focussed academia.

Hope they have gendarmes checking the tickets.