My summer of queer cinema reading and watching comes to fruition in the Tablet. Short and sweet, as I am and try to be

Powerful, good-humoured, and moving writing from a friend here in the Tablet - bringing a helpfully steady and personal perspective to a topic so often discussed in the most po-faced and dead-ended of ways: www.thetablet.co.uk/features/the...

A beautiful sign I happened across when collecting some laundry high up on a hill (our washing machine broke).

Took to the streets with my new colleagues and new union today. As ever, joy, fury, good humour, and hope in action

This is what happens when you spend Christmas morning reading William Blake and watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but is the Everlasting Gobstopper a play on The Everlasting Gospel?

Struck by Johnson’s essay on his evacuation generation

Poor Cow, the greatest title in literary history

It’s Week 9 and very much channeling this lunatic energy in the classroom youtu.be/ROKXlvYMKQc?...

Fabulous image of B.S. Johnson eating his words that one of my students included in their book review of Albert Angelo

Terrific teaching material today

Actually managing to do a bit of work on my slow-coming book and thus revisiting one of my favourite anecdotes in the project, that Kafka ordered a brochure for Summerhill school (before it was named that), the place where his future translators the Muirs were living and working

A great British train journey

Week 3 in Lynda Nead’s British Blonde: Women, Desire, and the Image in Post-War Britain lectures. A dream come true to watch such a spirited and also unsettling analysis of Barbara Windsor and the Carry On phenomenon

Today I got to chat with a student about Christopher Isherwood and Alan Hollinghurst as literary sugar daddies, and that is one pleasure about this job that I love and would miss

The second of Lynda Nead’s Paul Mellon Lectures on British Blonde in postwar Britain. This time a moving and furious look back on the life and death of Ruth Ellis, seen here brandishing her “painfully non-U” little finger as she takes a drink

Today’s #BritishFictionsofthe1960s teaching. We’re talking class (in both senses), late modernism, and proposing our own Johnsonian experiments in form

Frank Kermode on writer’s block

My morning potion of lemon, ginger, honey, and cayenne pepper tea, to ward off sickness, with today’s teaching - really superb, funny and sad stories of mad workplaces and desperate “losers” hooked on insane self-help schemes. Happy Friday!