Luke Seaber
LightNews LightNews
banner
thelong1930s.bsky.social
Luke Seaber
@thelong1930s.bsky.social
1.3K followers 310 following 870 posts
Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture, UCL. Proudly Cornish and quasi-Italian. Interested in the 1930s (1848-1950). Biographer of Celia Fremlin.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Luke Seaber
meganfaragher.bsky.social
I would like to propose making it a social crime to be mad at United States academics not keeping up with writing deadlines and non urgent email right now.

We’re all doing our best!

If you’re down to absolve one another, let me know.
a little girl in overalls is standing with her arms outstretched and saying `` i 'm trying '' .
ALT: a little girl in overalls is standing with her arms outstretched and saying `` i 'm trying '' .
media.tenor.com
November 21, 2025 at 4:52 AM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
rincewind.run
always remember: Terry Pratchett said trans rights

this book was written in 1996 by a 48 year old British man and no cis person in 2025 has a single goddamn excuse to behave differently
November 20, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
rincewind.run
Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay, for Trans Day of Remembrance
“‘Do you think there’s something a bit… odd about Littlebottom?’ ‘Seems like a perfectly ordinary female to me,’ said Angua. ‘Female? He told you he was female?’ ‘She,’ Angua corrected. ‘This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We’ve got extra pronouns here.’”
November 20, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
jntod.bsky.social
'Those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War' (Peter Cook)
November 20, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
scsheil.bsky.social
Today’s best second-hand buy:
A 1960s hardback book - Prisoner’s Base by Celia Fremlin. The cover has an illustration of a man’s face in blocks of blue and green. The outline of a pair of chickens, one yellow, one green, sits in the face.
November 20, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
radzpandit.bsky.social
Today's #bookmail.

THE DEVIL'S BOOK by Asta Olivia Nordenhof. This is the second in the Scandinavian Star series. Loved the first, MONEY TO BURN. Translated by Caroline Waight.

And Celia Fremlin's collection of short stories, BY HORROR HAUNTED.
THE DEVIL BOOK by Asta Olivia Nordenhof BY HORROR HAUNTED by Celia Fremlin
November 12, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
ginarcollia.bsky.social
Book post... A couple of Celia Fremlin books for the cold nights in front of the fire that we're about to have (starting Monday, I think). But Randolph Ratty says they look way to frightening for him... 😳
November 11, 2025 at 12:24 PM
thelong1930s.bsky.social
Again. He’s done it again!

The man’s a legend.
darcy1968.bsky.social Darcy Moore @darcy1968.bsky.social · 1d
In Austria. Today was one of those golden days where a hunch is proven correct & the most indistinct trail of breadcrumbs has led to the hard evidence I suspected would exist. I found #Charoux’ diary for 1941-1950. There are multiple entries about #Orwell dining at the sculptor’s home; more anon.
November 20, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
moderniststudies.bsky.social
Important news: the deadline for the joint BAMS/MSA conference in Loughborough has been extended to December 29, 2025! You can review the CFP, and find links to the submission platform, here. www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...
The Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the later nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. The o...
www.moderniststudies.org
November 20, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
drdominicdean.bsky.social
The heartbreaking, obscene thing is that while the target audience *might* notice and remember headlines about the extension of ILR requirements for 48 hours at most, tens of thousands of individuals and British families will live with a whole decade or more of stress, uncertainty, punitive expense.
November 20, 2025 at 5:41 PM
thelong1930s.bsky.social
He do the PowerPoint in different voices.
November 20, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
thelondonjournal.bsky.social
Call for papers for our new special issue on 'Nocturnal London', edited by Maurizio Cinquegrani, Yihong Zhu, and @mcmccluskey.bsky.social. Abstracts due in by 31 March 2026.

All submissions and reposts much appreciated.
Nocturnal London: From Torches to Neon Signs in a City After Dark Edited by Maurizio Cinquegrani, Yihong Zhu and Michael McCluskey The editors of this special issue, Maurizio Cinquegrani, Yihong Zhu and Michael McCluskey invite submissions on the theme of London nights. This volume of the London Journal will examine the histories of the city after dark, from its origins in Roman London to the present. Often overlooked, night has long been an essential dimension of urban life: as the city’s appearance change in the lightening of torches, oil lamps, gaslight, incendiary bombs and neon signs, nocturnal imagery, sounds, smells and professions – legal and not legal – emerge from the darkness. For Londoners, the night was never simply the absence of day; it was a time of danger, sociability, and creativity; a theatre of crime and vice, but also of performance, work, and pleasure. The special issue will place particular emphasis on moments when the character of London’s nights was especially contested, including – but not limited to – the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, the Victorian, the wartime and the postwar city. The Elizabethan period witnessed the emergence of the city’s playhouses, taverns, and nocturnal entertainments, alongside concerns about disorder and moral decline. Eighteenth-century coffee-houses and club meetings reflected the nocturnal city’s uneasy mix of polite sociability and transgressive undercurrents, while pleasure gardens flourished as spaces of spectacle, employment, cross-class mingling, and erotic charge under cover of darkness. In the Victorian era, the introduction of gaslight transformed both the material and imaginative experience of the night, making the city’s streets newly navigable while also exposing poverty, vice, and vulnerability to the gaze of reformers, police, photographers, and journalists. Wartime London, by contrast, was marked by darkness and silence imposed from above: the blackout and the Blitz remade the urban night as a zone of danger, solidarity, and belonging. The postwar decades, and especially the 1960s, brought the era of Swinging London, in which nightlife became emblematic of youth, fashion, music, and cultural revolution. Equally important are the particular districts that have defined London’s reputation after dark, including – but again not limited to – the West End and the East End. The East End has been imagined as a zone of poverty, danger, and cultural resilience, alive with street-level economies that flourished under cover of night. The West End has long been associated with theatres, clubs, and the rituals of fashionable display. Soho, especially in the twentieth century, became a microcosm of cosmopolitanism, transgression, and reinvention, providing a home for migrants, artists, musicians, and London’s gay community, who together redefined the possibilities of nocturnal sociability. Beyond districts and periods, we also invite reflections on the people who navigated, transformed, and reimagined the nocturnal city. The editors are especially keen to foreground questions of diversity and difference. How have London’s nights been inhabited, shaped, and contested by women, by queer citizens, by migrants and racialised communities, and by those whose working lives were tied to the hours of darkness? How was night both policed and celebrated? How did nocturnal spaces serve as arenas of negotiation between surveillance and resistance, authority and anonymity, privilege and precarity? How have representations in literature, theatre, music, art, and film contributed to the cultural meanings of the nocturnal city? We welcome submissions from across the disciplines, including history, literary and cultural studies, art history, archaeology, urban geography, sociology, performance and media studies, as well as ecology, environmental humanities, and architecture and urbanism. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, as are contributions that combine archival research with theoretical or methodological innovation. Abstracts of 300–400 words, accompanied by a short biographical statement, should be submitted by 31 March 2026. Full-length articles will be in the range of 6,000–8,000 words and are due by 31 March 2027. Please send proposals and queries to Maurizio Cinquegrani, Yihong Zhu, and Michael McCluskey (m.cinquegrani@kent.ac.uk, scarlett.zhu24@gmail.com, and m.mccluskey@northeastern.edu) with the subject line Nocturnal London Special Issue.
November 20, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
davidandress.bsky.social
The key problem here, in the *cough* social epistemology of patriarchy, is that people hear "secret child-sex-trafficking ring" and think "murdered pre-pubescents".

When they hear "15-yr-old girls passed around by rich men", they think "sluts".
dov.bsky.social Marxist-Tolkienist-Zelenskyist 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · 2d
I really don't like how aggressively you people are missing the point
dov.bsky.social Marxist-Tolkienist-Zelenskyist 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · 2d
to me the truly disturbing thing about all the epstein shit is not so much who it comes out was part of it. it's that it is essentially something that shouldn't, conventional (among progressives too!) wisdom suggested, have been possible: an actual secret paedophile ring of the rich and powerful
November 20, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
jacquelyngill.bsky.social
There’s also been (at least for public institutions) a deliberate pivot away from the mission as we treat higher ed like a for-profit business. All these restructuring exercises based on ROI, closing key departments in the humanities, etc., are not mission-driven decisions.
November 19, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
drfrancisyoung.bsky.social
It’s wild that the rate for writing 500 words in a compilation trade book is about the same as the royalties I’ve received over a 10-year period for an academic book that did reasonably well, by academic publishing standards
November 19, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
ncdominie.bsky.social
"He got among a set of men who did nothing but smoke and drink beer. Malthusians, we call them."

"Malthusians!"

"'Malt,' you know, aunt, and 'use;' meaning that they drink beer."
November 19, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
meganfaragher.bsky.social
Why is art only for some students?
annakornbluh.bsky.social Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 3d
ideas are for everybody. history is for everybody. art is for everybody. including the working young people of new jersey.
November 18, 2025 at 11:22 PM
thelong1930s.bsky.social
That odd feeling when you have a chapter accepted *and have no recollection of what you proposed*.
November 18, 2025 at 10:37 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
pseudo-isidore.bsky.social
"Chapman said that “the UK tries to do too much” and should focus on “where we can lead on the global stage”.
So, more investment in "Humanities" disciplines, right?
November 18, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
vandawilcox.bsky.social
1938 advert for colonial fizzy drinks made in Italian East Africa, proudly proclaimed to be Made in the Empire

(I would like to try tamarind soda though, I must admit)
Colourful advert for 'Italsoda' with a green bottle in the background and multicoloured circles displaying all the flavours available
November 18, 2025 at 12:30 PM
thelong1930s.bsky.social
I’ve just realized that I’ve always been confusing Larry Summers and Larry David. Oops.
November 18, 2025 at 1:17 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
mattthr.bsky.social
This mural has gone up in Kingston, ostensibly for Christmas but AI has ensured it's actually to celebrate the return of our dark lord Cthulhu
November 18, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
drdominicdean.bsky.social
If there is ever a halfway progressive government in the UK, it will be important to ensure that the consequences of how ministers and MPs behave in *this* government follow them afterwards. No cushy jobs in think tanks, universities, NGOs, cultural organisations for those who deny basic humanity.
November 17, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
profaliceroberts.bsky.social
Really good to hear Stella Creasy on @newsagents.bsky.social saying students should be removed from immigration figures. Of course they should! And they make up a huge chunk of the figures - around half. They’re part of the success story of global Britain - coming here to get a great education.
November 17, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Luke Seaber
victorianlondon.bsky.social
kudos for the curator who decided Kenneth Williams was more culturally significant than Richard Burton.
November 17, 2025 at 6:01 PM