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

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

Struck by Johnson’s essay on his evacuation generation

Poor Cow, the greatest title in literary history

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

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!