Thomas Frere

Is there anything quite so embarrassingly awful as this American #WorldCupDraw ?The ‘banter’ is bum-crinkling. Just get in with it!

An ornamented initial from a 12th-century manuscript of Anselm of Canterbury’s Prayers and Meditations depicting the author as archbishop.

Thomas I (of Bayeux), first Norman archbishop of York and founder of its Norman cathedral, consecrated Anselm, pictured, as archbishop of Canterbury #OTD in 1093. 📸Bodleian Library #medievalsky

Black & white photo of young actor in breeches foot up on a chair

Sometimes I think I should take a leaf out of my grandfather’s book and go a little more jaunty with the Spotlight photo…
#actor #theatre #ChistopherFrere

Which of these parts of Labour's progressive 2025 Budget is your favourit part?

Or if something else, add in a comment below!

The stained-glass rose window at Lincoln Cathedral dates from about 1325 and is known as the “Bishop’s Eye”, England.

The stained-glass rose window at Lincoln Cathedral dates from about 1325 and is known as the “Bishop’s Eye”, England.

Tom Stoppard, playwright of dazzling wit and playful erudition, dies aged 88 A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...

Tom Stoppard, playwright of dazzling wit and playful erudition, dies aged 88

Quiet night in

Michael Gove Made Orwell Prize Judge Despite Record of Attacking Journalists and Dodging Scrutiny Critics say "Orwell would have enjoyed the irony" of the former Conservative minister's appointment

I’m a past winner of the Orwell Prize & won partly because I exposed Vote Leave’s unlawful activities.

Michael Gove was its co-convener & refused to answer a single q. He’s now a judge of the prize & our world is truly one that Orwell would recognise

bylinetimes.com/2025/11/25/m...

I am so excited for this! We are going to get very silly and hopefully raise lots of money for excellent causes! Come hang out and help sow even more chaos with our donation incentives

YouTube video by Paul Simpson AI Can’t Replace This: How Jacky Fitt Turns Words into Business Gold

The missus did a podcast:
(She’s rather good!)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC6-...

Is the reason there has been so much speculation and trailing of what might happen in the #budget that, when we actually get to it, we'll be too bloody bored to talk about it anymore?

We're hiring for 2026! 📣

We are looking for people to join our Stage Management team for our hugely anticipated Season 2026, curated by our Artistic Director, Alan Cumming.

Full details on our website.
👉 pitlochryft.com/JoinOurTeam

📸 Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

At last! A positive Labour policy

The Ballad of the Quiet Piggy

a close up of a man 's face with the words just leave written in white ALT: a close up of a man 's face with the words just leave written in white

Meanwhile, on X - Grok is denying the Holocaust... and all our institutions and politicians and media giants just stay there like that's perfectly OK.

What does it take to get people to leave that horror show??? Seriously.

“This change in what people eat is fuelled by powerful global corporations who generate huge profits by prioritising ultra-processed products, supported by extensive marketing and political lobbying to stop effective public health policies to support healthy eating.”

Snowed here in York for full on 5 minutes!

Excellent interview given by @hughfw.bsky.social on @bbcr4 today programme about Ultra Processed Foods - yes, we should be legislating not just telling people what they should eat!

What a game! #ScovDen
Congratulations Scotland 👏👏👏

"The cat scratched my groin when he saw that woman from Strictly"
"Claudia Winkleman?"
"No, man, but it was close"

Love that place

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Wonderful! Thank you.

An essential precondition for authoritarianism is the neutering of sources of real news.

Know the building well but never knew this - thank you!

The fact that the BBC has made serious culpable errors does not negate the point that there is a real and concerted right-wing media campaign to destroy it. Both points can be true at the same time and the campaign would not end even if the errors did.

Last week she wanted her own bench in the sun, now she wants her own radiator
Yami the #cat #KeepingWarm

A man collapsed in the Oval Office. The internet got the story wrong. A case study in how bad information can spread — and how hard it is to correct it.

open.substack.com/pub/dandiamo... Here’s a great example of how the social media industry is wired to prefer colourful false information over the mundane truth

🤣

Only a celebrity could get that upset about winning 😭😢🥹!

#AlanCarr #CelebrityTraitors