James Hawes
@jameshawes
Father of three boys. Married to an Irishwoman. Ex-novelist. Historian. Teacher of writing. Novel “Speak for England” (2005) predicted Brexit - “it deserves some kind of prescience prize" (Observer, 2017). Website: Jameshawes.org.uk
Love the way everyone is so shocked about this. Like the USA hasn’t always supported groups it sees as politically aligned, however vaguely - like certain famous British artists in the 1960s…
The Green Revolution is happening across the globe at a vast scale, driven by huge players. Drilling or not in the North Sea is of virtually no account in the global equation. If it’s part of a package that successfully resists right-wing populism in 🏴🏴🏴, it’s certainly worth it.
So unlike Liz Truss’s insane free market buccaneering plans which the goddam Marxist bond markets destroyed in a day: those, of course, required no snap election in order for the population to scrutinise them before she tanked the economy…
You must’ve been taught young. Like my son, here in slo-mo in his grandmothers Donegal farmyard last year
If you’re in or around #Sligo on 23 July, I’ll be giving the patent one hour/60+ projected images speed-tour through Irish history, based on the current #1 @theirishtimestoday.bsky.social bestseller, starting at 5:30 in this beautiful bookshop @booksky.club @booksky.bsky.social
Happy 7th Birthday, German paperback edition! When I despair at the complete lack of any notice whatever in the UK for the success of The Shortest History of #Ireland there, I remind myself: if it‘s good, honest work, it will last.
Your reminder that “he made a fortune out of crypto“ about anybody means: “he persuaded gamblers to buy something with no use other than to people with Dark Money, and no intrinsic value, purely on the basis that they believed other gamblers would fall for the same pitch in spades.“
Von einem Kölner Freund heute Nachmittag. Auf dem Balkon. Im Schatten.
See what “Andy” is doing wrong already? Frenchified words when Anglo-Saxon-root words would do just as well. His thinks it sounds dignified. Ordinary people hate it. *Talk English, not Norman FFS* The good guys need to learn this trick or the bad guys are going to win, because they get it.
Translation: big institutional holders are selling up, leaving all those little #Musk -ovites (who basically believe Elon has the Philosopher’s Stone) holding the baby.
Made me think of this pair of very early Bronze Age twins we excavated at Goldington in 1986. They were buried with a small supply of toasted hazelnuts, which still rattled when you shook them. The most hardened excavators among us stood in contemplation for awhile.
“The northmen, being sensible that the only impediment was now withdrawn, and that there was no one now who would care to resist their inroads, again swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England.” Croyland Cronicle 1461
Someone just sent me this from Dublin. Strange to think that three years ago, I was teaching “Normal People” as a set creative writing text in Oxford…
Irish Times today. If you could spread this news it would be great because tbh it’s getting a bit weird. Weeks at #1 in Ireland: 9 Mentions in UK press: 0 (apart from one in the fine @thenewworldmag.bsky.social but that doesn’t really count because I wrote it myself at their kind invitation!)
I have been accused of over-egging the North-South divide in 🏴. It pre-dates the Romans and has never died. Ask Prof Danny Dorling of Oxford University. Or pretty well any journalist in 🏴 today.
Oh, enough of this banal libertarianism. For example, this Act was objected loudly on “libertarian” grounds (here’s a Tory MP in Hansard) and many people thought dog-owners would simply refuse en masse to obey it. It has, in fact, completely transformed UK streets, parks and beaches.
Your reminder of the revolting but indubitable fact that if this jogger had turned out to be a black man who’d migrated quite legally to the UK from Africa (as opposed to a white banker born here), #Musk would right now be telling 200 million people that African migrants are naturally murderous.