One of the challenges of teaching history, and one of the dangers to our wider intellectual life, is that we are surrounded by media that summarises and quotes incredibly inaccurately. This makes it hard to convince people of the precision involved in good quoting or paraphrasing. Casual example:

This is Raynor Winn's (The Salt Path etc) origin story basically

When you want the world to know your system is Tampa proof

I've been playing around with woodblock printing and this is my favourite thing I've made so far

£50 is the Welsh dragon because dragons are everything to everyone everywhere. They can be jealous hoarders of gold, or wise advisors, or shape shifters. Nothing beats a dragon, and it does not pay to laugh at them

(That was the £10 note obviously) £20 is Scotland, the unicorn, the most elusive and beautiful of mythical creatures. Don't think too closely about the stories of maidens laying the horn in their laps and the creature shedding a creamy tear, it gets sleazy too quickly

Next up, England's national animal is also real, but wins points for being nothing to do with England. The lion is an immigrant, a brave and transformative outsider so powerfully integrated into national symbolism that the English forget it's an immigrant

Disappointingly, Northern Ireland has no national animal but it seems the Eurasian oystercatcher is considered its national bird, at least unofficially. So that's your £5 (it is a real animal that is native to the place, nothing against it but it's not thrilling)

UK academics! Reminder to vote in the UCU NEC elections. @calvirgi.bsky.social and I just remembered to send ours off today 😁

I don't use X but have left my account there. To illustrate this point about how useless it is for sharing work, see what happens when an account with over three thousand followers shared a blog post I wrote for them:

samgrinsell.hcommons.org/2025/12/10/p... NEW BLOGPOST - Planetary Infrastructures. In which I continue thinking about history as connection, this time through a course I've been teaching this term

Education. Education. Education.

Don't we all mate, don't we all

Coming into Book Buying Age around the time this was a best seller gave me a really misleading sense mainstream non-fiction publishing:

Found the suburban street Sauron retires to

After we're done with gender this should be the only ways toilets are organised [Except for paying obviously]

Novak Djokovic, the arch competitor, the crank, the sculptor of his body into the ultimate victory machine. The Christiano Ronaldo of tennis

Nadal as the greatest on the big stage, the winner of everything, oozing flair and power. Winning even when he can barely stand. Has to be Messi

Federer would surely have had the effortless grace and mastery of Andrea Pirlo

What a glorious day to be a Crystal Palace fan! Whatever happens next, we'll remember that 3-0 for a long time

I will never stop pointing out that any analysis of the Brexit vote that ignores the Surrey golf courses where a strong proportion of the comfortably off decided to vote leave to shake things up a bit is a failure to grasp the politics of 2016

It was in response to this post, which I still think is a pretty crass way of responding to Trump's early weeks:

Trump has lost the Daily Heil

Tfw you see something that doesn't look right

Tell me I'm not the only football fan who, whenever [Jared] Bowen is mentioned, pictures Dennis Quaid

Going to tell all my Anglo pals that the beat fusili comes from Pasta del Capitano

Late stage tech capitalism in the form of a plastic tray:

This gives me the opportunity to point out something that's always bugged me about a book I'm published in: look at how the cover isn't fitted right to the pages. Yes, printed in the UK (and will cost you north of £100)