Sarah Pritchard
banner
sarahjp.bsky.social
Sarah Pritchard
@sarahjp.bsky.social
Books, libraries, food, travel.
Still as brilliant and heart-warming a post as when I read it first, last year. Librarians 💪💪💪
"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas"

The story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending

My popular seasonal post from last year:
emptycity.substack.com/p/twelfth-ni...

Now with a couple of footnotes one year on:
emptycity.substack.com/p/twelfth-ni...
"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas"
The story of a forty-year book-quest and of its remarkable ending
emptycity.substack.com
December 24, 2025 at 9:36 AM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
Another lovely #buyastrangerabook offer.

Some of @sarahjp.bsky.social 's children's favourite books.

The Tiger Who Came to Tea
Owl Babies
Tabby McTat
Otto the Book Bear

Sarah is offering to buy one of them for someone, so get in touch if you'd like one.
December 17, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Rob Reiner made some bloody brilliant films. When Harry met Sally is in my top 5 favourites ever. It also sounds like he was an awesome human being 😭
December 15, 2025 at 9:23 AM
Amazing Radiohead at the O2 last night. Songs across all albums and an unforgettable encore of absolute classics, ending with karma police
November 22, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Finished Ethan Frome. Love Wharton, and this slimmer tome didn't disappoint. Might start a Brontë. It's the weather for classic literature...
November 7, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Diane Keaton was such an awesome actor. That Annie Hall lobster scene was👌
October 11, 2025 at 9:48 PM
I can't work out what the Beths album reminds me of but the songwriting is outstandingly good. It sounds like it was woven out of the collective dreams of 6Music listeners, which I mean as a compliment
October 10, 2025 at 11:00 AM
These librarians are amazing. Not sure whether I'm more angry or depressed after watching this brave documentary
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
BBC Four - Storyville, The Librarians
Documentary about the US librarians who are risking their safety to defend free speech.
www.bbc.co.uk
October 9, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
AJP Taylor - not a referencing guy
September 10, 2025 at 9:11 AM
Really interesting piece on the strange and wonderful films of David Lynch. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Ruby Hamilton · Things go kerflooey: David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry
David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-...
www.lrb.co.uk
September 9, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Well. This is a gut-punch of novel. A highly intriguing, and somewhat depressing it has to be said, dystopia. (I'm recommending it, by the way!) 💙📚
August 20, 2025 at 7:12 AM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
Animal Farm at Eighty

“I took it out of the library, and read it quietly, in bed, under the covers.”

On the 80th anniversary of its publication, read my first encounter with Orwell’s Animal Farm:

orwellfoundation.substack.com/p/it-all-mad...

@ofmooseandmen.bsky.social
@orwellprize.bsky.social
"It all made such shockingly perfect sense." Animal Farm at Eighty
Friends of the Foundation recall their first encounters with George Orwell's masterpiece
orwellfoundation.substack.com
August 17, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
In 2022, Nadhim Zahawi’s solicitor sent me a libel threat - and said I wasn’t even allowed to say he’d written to me.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ruled that was improper.

Now he’s appealing.

A 🧵 on why it matters.
August 5, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
A 7-year-study of 70,000 elderly people from 19 towns in Japan has found that the more public library books there are in a town, the fewer residents need long-term nursing care.
July 28, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
I had a friend in grad school who grew up in the South who used to joke that no matter how hot it is in the summer you always close the car windows when you park your car because if you don't you'll come back and find your back seat full of zucchini.
How many of us are currently in WhatsApp groups where 90 percent of the members are desperately trying to offload their zucchini and cucumbers to the other 10 percent
July 26, 2025 at 11:33 PM
This mincemeat cake by @nigelslater.bsky.social is my husband's favourite. I learnt the hard* way that mincemeat is tricky to source in the summer, so now every Christmas I buy an extra jar and keep it for July 😇
*expensive #foodsky #cake
July 25, 2025 at 12:26 PM
3/4 of the way through this and absolutely loving it. Such a nice idea to tell their biography through song analysis.
Just finished this and will now listen to The Beatles with fresh ears. Also confirms that they wrote ‘Get Back’ as a refutation of Enoch Powell, while Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart agreed with him
July 25, 2025 at 11:36 AM
The End of the Affair, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Age of Innocence, House of the Spirits, Paradise Lost.... this is too hard!
Yes Moby-Dick is the best book I have ever read. You do not have to agree. In fact, I don't want you to! Tell me your one, and I will eventually get round ot it. Don't be shy. We're all here to celebrate whatever this is. Just name it.
This is a bit of the very, very best book I have ever read. You should try it too. There is NOTHING like it. OILY VINTAGES #QueuingForCrumble
July 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
He's one of Britain's richest men. So why does Asif Aziz's property company keep leasing London gift shops to overseas students based in abandoned offices or flytipped car parks — before vanishing without paying millions of pounds in taxes? www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-l...
The billionaire and the tax evading gift shops
Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital manages a row of high-profile shops at Piccadilly Circus. So why does his team keeping renting them to students who vanish without paying millions of pounds in taxes?
www.londoncentric.media
July 22, 2025 at 6:48 AM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
‘Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients when they sat and talked in libraries. But they knew little about what these lost collections looked like or included.’

Anthony Grafton on Renaissance libraries: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Anthony Grafton · No Cheese Please: The First Bibliophiles
The library made possible a new kind of intellectual life. Machiavelli, when he’d been exiled from Florence, described...
www.lrb.co.uk
July 18, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
‘There were rules, seemingly handed down from her; I followed them. Write the poems straight through from beginning to end, and tell people you’re doing it. It felt strangely joyful, propelled by its own velocity.’

A fantastic essay on Sylvia Plath by @tricialockwood.bsky.social for @lrb.co.uk
Patricia Lockwood · Arrayed in Shining Scales: Solving Sylvia Plath
I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was...
www.lrb.co.uk
July 3, 2025 at 3:09 PM
*squeals excitedly*
June 16, 2025 at 9:31 PM
30 years on and we've both still got it. Shouting and pointing magnificently last night🕺#pulp
June 15, 2025 at 7:23 AM
Macaroni cheese with a can of Guinness in the sauce, topped with sage 😋 #foodsky
May 11, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by Sarah Pritchard
Death by Shakespeare
Causes of 74 deaths in Shakespeare's plays
#ShakespeareDay
April 23, 2025 at 5:25 AM