PhD application season is among us 😵‍💫 If there are any marginalised scholars who would like to chat about any aspect of the application process for Classics and/or History in the UK my DMs are always open! 💓

This is an especially foolhardy line when the only prominent thing delivered so far is... taking away money from pensioners.

Looking forward to visiting Poland for the first time, in early December. Also, many other interesting talks on late antique topics:

Means testing for the previously universal WFP benefit is being widely described as "cuts affecting the poorest" and it's 🤯 blowing my mind. It's literally protecting the poorest pensioners and taking money off the rest, ALL of whom are better off anyway due to the triple lock.

On average in the UK, 16% of pensioners live in relative poverty while 30% of children live in relative poverty. Thirty fucking per cent. If only a fraction of the concern expressed about pensioners in the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express was expressed about children.

RIP Maggie Smith The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is a rare perfect book that also got a perfect screen adaptation w Maggie Smith brilliant in the title role of the clever, sexy, vulnerable, slightly unhinged Jean Brodie BTW we all need to use "calumny" more 👇

I feel I could stand to hear more about who is funding the various Tory candidates, and whether anyone has been buying them clothes, and in whose houses they may or may not have been meeting.

Liz Truss tells Conservative party conference that she is a "huge fan" of Argentina's far right leader Javia Milei. Says if Milei were standing for Tory leader "I would back him in a shot"

Not a single word of criticism of the Israeli massacres and crimes of aggression in Lebanon. The PM says he is worried about miscalculation: it's a miscalculation to imagine we can't all see what's happening here, or to give the murderous Israeli regime carte blanche.

Congratulations to Lilah Grace Canevaro, and to all the other winners of Philip Leverhulme Prizes in Classics!

Councils have essentially become social and children's care funding agencies, which, as most people don't use those services, means they don't really understand where all their council tax is going...

Why are we hearing so much about the 4% of people who are landlords, and 7% who go to private school, rather than the more than 9 in 10 of us who do not? How coverage of the Budget has been heavily slanted towards the interests of a wealthy minority adambienkov.co.uk/p/you-want-to-…

We mourn the loss of Emeritus Professor Keith Rutter, who died this morning: a great Greek historian and numismatist, an utterly dedicated teacher, and active in the department and scholarship long after retirement. We will miss him badly, and send deep sympathy to his family.

The thing about "the UK’s tax burden is now at a record high", is that this is also true for almost all countries 📈

(🧵) ELECTION THREAD: I’ve been waiting all night to say anything substantive about what’s happened, as I felt—I still do—that I might say something I’d regret. I hope you’ll consider following along as I try to process this with you all, and try to do it responsibly. Please RT.

Word of the day is ‘recrudescence’ (17th century): the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.

Count Mysterioso🎗️ A Trappist podcast: The Rest is Silence

in retrospect, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords really might've been a better basis for a system of government.

"The ages most represented among the dead were five to nine-year-olds."