"Paths in the Snow", my book on Narnia is available for pre-order now (and out next month). It has been tremendous fun to write and research, and I really hope people enjoy it. I've written a bit about it here - shares much appreciated! https://t.co/8S3GACyfbK

Me: thank you, Amazon, for quickly delivering me one small, inexpensive folding desk Amazon: I see you’re opening a museum of folding desks. Allow us to recommend 25 different desks and nothing else, ever again.

@jembloomfield Is that because John Cadbury opened his first shop in Birmingham?

@jembloomfield Mine at the moment is Anne of Green Gables, and I bottled out of the Canadian accents. But I heroically sustained the Derbyshire accents for the entirety of 'A Traveller in Time'

#CelebrityTraitors

@jembloomfield I think you might be going for Black Country. My version is chocklutt or perhaps chocklert. Two syllables. I was born and brought up in Selly Park

My latest—and longest—Substack post, "Bluesky Thinking", is live. Sorry it's such an epic. As you might guess from the datestamps on its supporting examples, an idle thought snowballed into a thesis as real-world news kept expanding the argument.

@jembloomfield Warren Clarke in “Nice Work” was an exceptionally convincing Brummie.

Britain 2025. Shameful.

The bedtime book at the moment is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I'm doing Willy Wonka as a Brummie. Vaguely Gothic novel about a lad with a factory? It was either try a Warren Clarke voice or go Brummie. Getting about four syllables into "chocolate", aimimg for five.

I frequently long for that one year where I did Christmas Carol advent, one in December in the run up to Christmas (and then on Christmas Day I read it). People keep making excellent new ones - maybe next year I’ll have a fresh 25!

That backwards "N" in the sign above his head is a dead giveaway - it's Cyrillic, ain't it.

@jembloomfield Years ago I saw Patrick Stewart as Prospero deliver that same speech: he seemed to be begging the audience for release. An electrifying performance.

Very, very odd, in a time when "The Science" and "Lessons From History" have become such powerful articles of faith in public discourse and identity. There's a risk that people invoke and accept them as authority for moral and social questions, not as dense, detailed knowledge.

One of the houses built into the ruined west front of the former Benedictine abbey at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. 📸 My own. #WallsOnWednesday #BuryStEdmunds

When Whistler showed 'Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,' in 1875, he outraged the chief moralist of art John Ruskin: 'I... never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.' And so a lawsuit began.

I don’t want to be *that Guy*, but…

'The Figure at the Window,' (1907) shows why Austin Spare was once hailed as the next Aubrey Beardsley and attracted extravagant praise from Augustus John, and John Singer Sargent, who described him as England's greatest draughtsman.

#VivienLeigh Vivien Leigh: Born on this day in 1913.

Autumn comes at you fast. That same tree this morning:

Very, very odd, in a time when "The Science" and "Lessons From History" have become such powerful articles of faith in public discourse and identity. There's a risk that people invoke and accept them as authority for moral and social questions, not as dense, detailed knowledge.