I'm excited to share this edited extract from my forthcoming book, The Invention of Essex

TODAY!

Looking forward to talking Essex, myth, storytelling and, since we're in the Hopkins Zone, witches, with the brilliant @akblakemore tomorrow (Sat) at Manningtree Arts' Big Day Out, at 2pm. Free entry with an RSVP, details and rest of schedule here: https://t.co/R5Argof1az

I'm at @hartsbooks in Saffron Walden to talk about The Invention of Essex this evening, from 6.30. More info here:

I asked colleagues about starvation in Gaza. They said there is no precedent for what is happening | Devi Sridhar

americans are so serious man, why is nobody fucking creasing there’s a man stuck in a vase for fuck sakes

“I have never… seen a place… so bombarded for such a long time with such a trapped population without any escape. People are traumatized beyond belief.” Jan @NRC_Egeland of @NRC_Norway is in Gaza for the first time since Oct 7. “I’m pretty shaken, actually, from what I saw.”

This was a really sad story to report. How the education of Ukrainian school children is being hurt by the war. Just under a million Ukrainian children are studying remotely and another million are doing a mixture of in-person and online classes because of air raid alarms.

Watching mealy mouthed, lost, pathetic Tory politicians pandering to extremists by being weather vanes instead of being signposts and leading from the front is always a good reason to post this take down of Enoch Powell by the great late Jonathan Miller.

A lovely surprise of a review of TIOE by a Harlow-born Essex boy living in Basque country: 'This is a great and unexpectedly moving read which I insistently recommend to anyone wishing to learn, or perhaps just think, more about Essex...'

🚨PUBLICATION DAY! Same dreamy cover. Easier to bend🚨

Boomers had Top of the Pops, whereas Gen Z has

Great summation, this: 'Gaza has become the expression of a legitimacy crisis for an Anglo-American political class who preside over already fragile systems that deliver less and less to their populations, and whose main offering is that the alternative is worse.'

Q: Does @UKLabour have a policy on tackling this crisis in cultural funding?

In this photograph Chris Evans and Laurence Fox have very strong 'German couple who have just checked into an AirB&B in Twickenham because they are going to see Depeche Mode but are 'first looking to have some of the famous British fish and chips!'' energy.

Flashback to that point in the interview where I have momentarily stopped listening to their previous answer and they are looking at me and I desperately make something up out of thin air

Intense flashback to being hauled into the headmaster's office

“Normally in consultation, what happens is that people send me letters. But no one had been sending letters … Next thing we knew the building work started. They [his constituents] are furious.”

Quite something to complain about how not enough American journalists are reporting on the Russian side of Putin's invasion of Ukraine when two of them – Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva – are *in jail right now* for doing just that

Oh my goodness it’s 2pm and no one I mean no one has been into the bookshop today we’ve not sold a single book, this is a first in 4 years! Not after sympathy just telling you how it is because these kind of trading conditions have massive knock on’s for the entire industry.

This is a problem I think about a lot, but I don't think policy makers consider anything like enough. My parents' generation are only really able to retire because they either paid off their mortgage or have social housing tenancies. What will become of us?