Prof Bob Davis
@Rokewood
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Prof of Religious & Cultural Education, Univ of Glasgow. Arts, Humanities, football, birds. We’ve 3 sons—‘the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’—Tweets personal
Glasgow, Scotland
Joined January 2010
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My friends: of your charity, please pray for the repose of my Mum, Kathleen Crossan Davis (1937-2023).
Fortified by her lifelong faith, she died peacefully this morning after a short illness. Beloved mother, grandmother, aunt. Her loss is a sorrowful as her gifts enduring. RIP.
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Well my friends, amidst the many trials of 2020,
@rokewife
& I have reached today our 40th Wedding Anniversary. We were 21 & 19. Ann still believes her father ought to have phoned the police 😊
#RubyWedding
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It’s very curious that for a long period critics of schools lambasted them as crucibles of pupil mental illness: endemic bullying, social exclusion, prejudice, toxic testing regimes. Now they are Shangri-las of wellbeing, absence from which is ruining the health of a generation🧐
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Scottish Labour looking as inert & ossified as ever. Anas Sarwar slipping into machine politician mould preparing to line up with the Tories. Jackie Baillie ‘acknowledging’ & not ‘accepting’ the Hamilton findings. Makes you want to puke. No wonder 1000s & 1000s have deserted them
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This. Never forget this. Ever
A heart-breaking moment captured in an SS photograph of a group of Hungarian Jews near gas chamber IV at
#Auschwitz
II-Birkenau in or around May 1944.
A child found a flower & is giving or showing it to an older boy.
All the people in the picture were gassed moments later.
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You know. I’m a subscriber. But every so often,
@guardian
— there *is* a national slavery museum. In Liverpool.
@SlaveryMuseum
. How did you miss this??
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Same old evidence free chestnuts every time. Catholic schools exist from New York to New Zealand; the Church is the biggest NGO provider of schooling in the world. We have a bunch of street bigots calling for the Irish to go home—& it’s the fault of Catholic schools
@kittycatboyd
Due to separate schools, very few Scottish children escape our country’s primary religious divide, writes
@fifikinrocks
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Now that we’re British again, let’s look back a thousand years to that great Englishman Cnut the Great. Who also hated Europe
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Well my friends. Several times in the last year we thought—& were warned—we might not see this day. But here tonight is my mother Kathleen, reaching 84 on
#StAndrewsDay
. Frail but alert as ever—& remembering her soldier Dad at the wireless, after Pearl Harbor was attacked.
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I share little of Roger Scruton’s politics & differ from him on many other questions. But he is a leading public philosopher & his views merit debate & where appropriate rebuttal, not this reflex silencing & erasure to which the Left now seems addicted
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Agreed!
@dcsandbrook
@holland_tom
. Absurd capitulation. & such a rebarbative replacement! Plus whoa! Wait till they hear about ‘Medieval’.
@Longshanks1307
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This festival of anti-Catholicism to be led by a political leader who maintains the current Tory government in power. Here is our ramshackle UK democracy—on the centenary of women’s & working class franchise—a lambeg beat from a dark, tribal violent past.
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With salutes to all who have accompanied our extended family on this journey: after 4yrs+, it is time to say a final farewell to our little one, as she joins her new adoptive family.
If our impact on her is 1 tenth that of her on us, then all, all will be well
(Numbers 6.24-26)
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My father's words—'those who romanticise working class life should recognise how much working people devote to changing it'
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I love the formula here, taking us for fools. You’re not ‘waiving’ the fee! You created the damned fee & now you’re cancelling it under ferocious criticism, as your government lurches aimlessly from crisis to crisis again. Not waiving but drowning mate!
We are waiving the fee for the EU Settlement Scheme - which is going live by March 30. EU citizens contribute so much to our country and we want you to stay - deal or no deal.
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Sooo. 45 years ago today (& it was a Friday) I asked Ann Connelly out ‘properly’, after knowing her for yonks. She agreed. I was 19 & she was 17.
We were going to go out for dinner tonight, but we both have the cold 🤧
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Thoughts & prayers my friends as our latest wonderful fosterling leaves the orbit of our extended family, after 2 & a half years, to go to his new home. A moment of great & mixed emotion for us. Acclaim esp for my dedicated SIL, who transforms these children’s lives (Matt 18.3)
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Here is something I think I (re)learned this weekend. So much of contemporary education is concerned with what ought to be *given* to us as learners; with everything to which we are entitled. We need to recover the ancient sense also of what education rightly *demands* of us
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In the pub in Cumbria where I am watching the game, English fans just bought an Italian guy a pint. Class.
#ENG
#ITAENG
#EURO2020
#Euro2020Final
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@KalwantBhopal
To pursue truth? Which at least from time to time might mean affirming, honouring, preserving & maintaining too. Surely
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My friends. On the eve of the much anticipated BBC adaptation of
#HisDarkMaterials
, a snapshot of a fax(!) sent to me by
#PhilipPullman
after I wrote to him about HDM & David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which is 100yrs old in 2020. It began a fascinating correspondence
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Well. Doubted this would ever happen more than once last 8 months. But Happy 83rd Birthday to my Mum. Mind as sharp as ever: philosophical about COVID, because 79yrs ago today the doctor was summoned (for half-a-crown btw) & diagnosed her diphtheria. She was in hospital for 16wks
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Yes. There are still those moments of unalloyed family pride & joy ☺️. As our youngest,
@GarethMDavis
, is awarded his PhD. & of course
@GlasgowUni1451
&
@UofGEducation
do this, as you would expect, in classic style …🙂🎅
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You think you know it all—from childhood instruction by parents, through school, to trained historical study—yet James Bulgin here on
@BBCTwo
tells you necessary truths that take the
#Holocaust
to new depths of moral & civic collapse
#HolocaustMemorialDay
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Still not 100% either of us. & fatigue is 1 of COVID-19’s calling cards. But
@rokewife
& I both emerging from our COVID slumbers, me a couple of days behind her. So many people to thank here &
@UofGEducation
for support & solicitude. Our 1st-born & his wife
@MJ_Deans
our lifeline
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But here here here everybody is the book I have simply lost myself in, these testing autumn nights. Get it. It is a triumph of storytelling, ancient & modern 😊😊 🦊
@AnneLouiseAvery
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#SimonArmitage
’s
#Coronation
poem is magical. Beautifully layered, watchful, invocatory; historically attentive & democratic. From the voice of Pepys observing a metropolitan truce in the protracted political crisis of the Stuarts, to the glimpse of King Edwin & Bede’s sparrow
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@matthewsyed
nails more in a couple of
@thetimes
paragraphs today than whole magazines of political copy
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@DrMatthewSweet
In the spirit of Matthew’s civilised reply, here is a very fine contemporary synthesis of one important dimension of this scholarship. One that might interest
@NeilDotObrien
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I tell you this, after 40-odd years working on literary texts of many kinds & eras & languages: revisiting Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ of 1885 convinces me anew that it is 1 of 19th century Scottish literature’s most accomplished & important books
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Well. In the COVID-19 darkness again.
We met when she was 12 & I was 13 (Scottish Country Dancing😩)
We started going out when we was 17
We got engaged when she was 18
Married when she was 19
She had babies at 26, 28 & 32
Teaching again at 38
& Mrs D
@rokewife
is .. 60 today😊🎄
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Well my friends. Adolf Hitler was Führer; Benito Mussolini Dictator; Francisco Franco Caudillo; Josef Stalin was General Secretary; Hirohito was Emperor. It was a dark, dark time—when my mother Kathleen Crossan McKenna was born, 85 years ago today
#StAndrewsDay
The light shines
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Don’t say academics can’t make a useful contribution to society. Impact. Knowledge exchange.
#clocksgoback
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A late-night poem that I think confirms
#CliveJames
as a truly accomplished writer in the confessional-elegiac mode.
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It can be a hard road out of COVID-19, even if you’re not hospitalised. If I made a mistake earlier, it was downplaying it & trying to work through it as I have with occasional viruses over the years. Patients vary but I would strongly counsel against this. Accept slower progress
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@annemcelvoy
On the other hand, Anne, you can point to shocking double standards when Police ‘escorted’ Rangers fans in celebration of their football title victory to George Square, Glasgow, last Sunday. And which elements of them then proceeded to trash
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it’s a while since ours were school age, but anybody else fed up with the ‘having-kids-at-home-over-the-summer-break-is-a-pain’ trope? We had & have a vested interest in schools, let me stress, but we *loved* having that 6 weeks (no not for sky-diving) just having them around
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#BrunhildePomsel
, who has died today aged 106, profiled last year—'No one believes me now, but I knew nothing’
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I haven’t read it yet, & I’m wary of TV tie-ins, but good on
@wmarybeard
taking on, & taking seriously for the post-secular age, the topic of religion—so often ignored or parsed as ‘something else’ in historical arguments of this kind. I look forward to reading
#Civilisations
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@DrMatthewSweet
Or a suspected stroke. My 85yo Mother’s legendary A&E reply a few months ago—‘The same scoundrel it was this morning?’
Though I have come to wonder if that’s a too-clever-by-half universal survivor answer … 😉
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Although it was probably predictable—but viewed even from taciturn non-EU Norway, the antics of the
#Brexitparty_uk
serve only to project an image of national vulgarity, resentment & uneducated ignorance. A country mired in rage & self-loathing
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@TheRippedBodice
@DawnHFoster
When I took out the DVD of The Sixth Sense, some wank had inserted a bit of paper saying ‘Bruce Willis is a Ghost’. At first I thought it was some weird post-modern comment on celluloid culture. 20mns into the film I was throwing beer at the screen.
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You know, increasingly, the leader from my lifetime of whom Mr Trump most reminds me is Idi Amin. The same capriciousness; the same channel-hopping mind mid-sentence; the same violent inversions of affection; the same lust for women; the same irrational obsession with Scotland
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Well with term gearing up & open days & schools & colleges going back, some timeless wisdom is opportune, students!—
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I lived through decades of a university culture vibrant with disagreement. Increasingly, now, I encounter stances where opponents are completely othered: their positions read not only as arguments to be rebutted, but delegitimised as constitutive, even moral-ontological, defects
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I can’t remember when we last did *not* host
#EasterSunday
dinner for the whole family. I’m not really an emotional man, but my elderly mother—a stranger to the internet—in her surgical gloves FaceTiming her grandchildren with my iPad today of all days moved me deeply
#COVID19
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I thought
#WolfHall
would be unsurpassable, but this extraordinary interpretation of
#WarAndPeace
reminds us equally of why we prize the BBC
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I cannot tell you how joyful it was today to be part of a real-life campus graduation. Seeing my Philosophy of Religion students successfully complete their studies!
@UofGlasgow
@UofGEducation
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Well Mike Leigh’s
#Peterloo
is indeed a masterpiece: it’s a demanding, concentrated, harrowing film, which affirms a politics of the spoken word & the basic claims of justice of an exploited & abandoned populous. It’s a style of film-making that wakens you from your slumbers
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My friends. 200yrs ago today
#Shelley
published under the pseudonym Gilrastes his legendary poem
#Ozymandias
in The Examiner. Our maverick & amazing teacher Peter Mallon taught it to us in 1973. It astonished me & I borrowed PBS’ poems from the library. It still astonishes me
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I agree with
@holland_tom
—
@Oklahomaharper
is a big contender for History book of the year, but so is less well known Willekes. Both altering our perception of the ancient world
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Venus soooo bright tonight. The planet of society, solidarity, love
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@premnsikka
Staggering Prem. Staggering. While multiple local authorities face bankruptcy, services crumble, waiting lists skyrocket, politicians discard social care promises, young people cannot find homes. The whole social contract begins to buckle.
We need to tax *wealth*
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I am enthusiastic for babies & new life; instinctively sympathetic for those who endure the grief of miscarriage. But Good Lord—that phrase, ‘It will be Johnson’s seventh known child’, has all the dignity & gravitas of the debauched court of Charles II.
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So I vote we just keep
#Christmas
going till February 2nd,
#Candlemas
. Like the Middle Ages, since we have the pestilence already.
How about it?
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So 1 of those poignant & satisfying personal moments today. Out with 2 of our dearest friends who got wed 1 month after us in 1980 (impossibly young too☺️). Neighbours since too; our firstborns used to share a twin buggy. Here today our
#Covid_19
delayed 40th anniversary dinner
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Think on this my friends. Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—a work of genius, which marks symbolically, in my view, the end of the British Enlightenment.
Here is Walter Scott’s extraordinary review of it—
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@MichaelRosenYes
oldest relative I met reasonably often was Great Aunt Lizzie (1869-1964). She was companioned to her Great Aunt Sarah (1803-89) in 1887. As children, Lizzie told us that Sarah as an old lady would speak fondly of her brother Samuel returning from ⚔Waterloo when she was 12
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Commemorating throughout 2023 the 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd. Englishman, Catholic, recusant, pupil of Thomas Tallis, & 1 of the greatest & most influential composers of these islands. Look across
@BBCRadio3
&
@ByrdCentral
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What a very fine person
@doctor_oxford
is. The sheer shared humanity here.
@BBCRadio3
Private Passions the perfect setting, with the ideal interviewer
@MichaelBerkele2
. Even in its trails,
#Breathtaking
, takes me back to those
#COVID19
horizons I glimpsed
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OK — joke of the Easter dinner from my DIL,
@Melissa_Deans
‘What thinks the unthinkable?’
*****
‘An itheberg’
😢🕺🚶🏼♀️
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1819 was 1 of the most important years in English Literature since the 1590s. It is the annus mirabilis of Keats’ Odes; the year of Shelley’s Anarchy, West Wind & Cenci; Byron’s Don Juan Cants 1&2; Scott’s Ivanhoe. It represents a new intersection of Romantic literature & culture
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Here it is at last: a book my former Tutor, Sir Tom Devine, told us was missing from Scottish historiography some 41 years ago.
He’s written it —
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You know if a student of mine had written 2yrs ago that racist anti-Irish supremacism still endured in the British establishment in the 21st century, I would have raised a sceptical eyebrow. But the scale & speed of its
#Brexit
resurgence suggests it never really went away
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You know something, Tweeters? Last week I had significant disagreements with 2 people I follow on Twitter. Let me say 2 younger public intellectuals of the 1st rank. We had searching civilised debate on controversial topics.
This week—we still follow each other.
It can be done
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By all means develop different choirs, but to trash the Anglican Choral tradition like this completely misunderstands diversity & interculturalism
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The best of a *great*
@BBCTwo
#Uncanny
trilogy. Well done
@danny_robins
& brave contributors. Real pathos too amidst the fright.
I don’t believe in ghosts (though certainly in God😉) or the paranormal, but this was genuinely terrifying. 🫨
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Wasn’t able to hear it live, but let me tell you
@danny_robins
#Uncanny
is a podcast highlight of 21/22. I’m a Prof of Religion (& a religious person—though with no belief in ghosts & no personal acquaintance with the paranormal) & I long for Series 2!
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Well all praise my amazing SIL, as another (very!) little 1 enters the (temporary!—though last 1 was 4yrs🙂) care of our extended family. Already digging out the the Euro ball for the garden 😊. & checking my BP
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Amazing—
Wolf seen in Brittany for first time in a century
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These words of my late father come back to me every time I hear threnodies for lost rust-belt communitarianism, about which he & my mother were always quietly sceptical—
‘those who romanticise working class life should recognise how much working people devote to changing it'
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Can I say an absolute load of superior quasi-racist shite is talked about Italy? Local & health authorities in Italy are among the best organised in Europe, with considerable powers, resources & civic support. Stereotypes should be ditched please. The emergency they face is ours
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The
#Brexit
Bores of my generation who talk as though they *were in* World War II (despite the fact that to have even a 7 year old’s memories of D-Day you’re now 82—my Mother’s age) really need to rediscover the War. No better place to start than
@james1940
’s new masterpiece
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I hope the dawn of the 20s allows us to revisit the reign of Cnut the Great, which entered its key phase on his return to England from Denmark in 1020. The Norman anniversaries have eclipsed memory of this period, which the English have always viewed ambivalently. Now is the time
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I wasn't kidding!—Scots Renaissance poet Gavin Douglas coined 'wow!' In his Aeneid trans:
'Out on thir wanderand spiritis, wow! thow cryis'
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My friends. It seems very fitting from the precincts of Enlightenment Manchester, & commemorating
#Peterloo2019
, that on Aug1 I proudly became new Director of
@robertowenctr
@UofGlasgow
@UofGEducation
, succeeding my distinguished colleague Prof. Michele Schweisfurth.
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Heh heh.
#TheWizardOfOz
on Channel 5 conjures this immortal TV guide to it 🎅🎅🤣🤣
#HappyNewYear
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@SSalyers2
@DonaldMurray56
This is an entirely fake document. You must know this. Otherwise tell us where the original resides.
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#LeonardCohen
—So ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in
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Has anybody essayed yet the ‘Larger than Life’ defence of
#TobyYoung
? I notice that the phrase is commonly applied to people in fact much smaller than life, imprisoned in a Blakean crystal cabinet of their own fears & loathings
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@HarryBrighouse1
Harry. Deepest condolences to you from
@UofGEducation
, from
@robertowenctr
, from
@PhilOfEdGB
. Truly a person of august & unmatched stature across our disciplines. A fine human being & a man who in all things *cared* about education & learners. The best of us. RIP.
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-5° here tonight. God help people struggling to heat their houses.
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Can't remember who passed this on, but as my new Masters & PhD students arrive, it's essential reading ☺️
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This is a gesture by a group of remarkable writers through which we might just glimpse a different kind of new normal
Thankyou to Highland Book Prize &
@KathleenJamie
, Roseanne Watt & Ali Smith! As shortlisted authors, we've formed a collective to accept the prize, in the name of collaboration not competition. The prize money has gone to Highland Food Bank. Much love all!
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Alas I am so very sorry to hear this. A truly great mind & a marvellous public intellectual & polymath.
Above all for me, those electrifying Shakespeare productions. RIP
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no newspaper it appears has so far asked how the protesters popping their voxes in such menacing fashion at
#AnnaSoubry
on College Green manage to absent themselves from either work or JSA reporting for such lengthy periods. Or if they enjoy, perhaps, a mysterious benefactor
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I am no defender of
#MargaretFerrier
. A vain & irresponsible person. But on these grounds, Dominic Cummings should also have been charged
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I knew I had this book lying around. I love the way in 1963 Mr Fitzsimons went for the usp ‘enemies’ rather than the more pedestrian ‘predators’. Makes it feel all the more *cosmic* yet at the same time all the more *personal* in its sheer intergenerational ‘swornness’ 🤣🤣🤣
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Sorry to capture bad language in this screenshot, my friends. But regardless of its provenance, this has to be dealt with & taken down by
@Twitter
&
@PoliceScotland
. & of course disowned as I’m certain it will be by
@RangersFC
& all decent fans.
The 3.5k followers not so much
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My father's words—'those who romanticise working class life should recognise how much working people devote to changing it'
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attacks on Jacob
#ReesMogg
’s Catholicism are often crude & gratuitous. But when he has the audacity on a flagship news prog to claim on
#EasterSunday
a *Christian* justification for the Government’s
#RwandaMigrationPlan
, he invites the full judgement of the New Testament upon him
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