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New history of Rome's heyday - Pax - out now! Dinosaur lover. Stonehenge Tunnel hater. A 'leading English cricketer' - The Times. Podcast: @theresthistory
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Jun 12, 2023 91 tweets 39 min read
To the seas of Suffolk, there to embark tomorrow with @jamiembrixton on a journey across England to Blackpool: coast to coast, as directly as we can, stopping off along the way to admire & explore what may lie in our path... Image And so it begins.

@jamiembrixton kneels in admiration before the spectacle of the river Deben, as it meets the North Sea. 2 Martello towers stand on sentry in the distance. #CoastToCoast Image
Apr 23, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Huge disappointment as the first match of the @AuthorsCC’s season is CANCELLED. ☹️ Still - I am yet to be dismissed this season!
Mar 10, 2023 69 tweets 33 min read
Up bright and early, to set off with @jamiembrixton on a tour of pre-Norman Conquest Kent! #PreConquestKent Image Huge excitement as we arrive at the first stop on our tour of #PreConquestKent: a Romano-British temple found during the building of a housing estate in Newington, just off Watling Street.

@jamiembrixton engages in some top archaeological research, scoping out the very site. Image
Jan 18, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
The readiness of faith leaders to ignore the evidence of history should it conflict with their doctrinal positions is always a bit depressing No! By and large, we owe what survives of classical literature to Christian copyists. Christian emperors might order heretical & astrological books burned - but there was never any campaign to destroy pagan learning. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Jan 17, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read
To the ancient city of Mandu, for a millennium and more a mighty stronghold, but also, in the 15th century, the scene of what @DalrympleWill has described as “one of the most singular experiments in pleasure that the world has ever seen.” “Ghiyath Shahi filled Mandu with no less than 16,000 beautiful female slaves and the good-looking daughters of his feudatory rajahs; the walled hilltop citadel was defended by an army of five hundred armour-clad girls from Abyssinia.”
Jan 2, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
The lift and changing rooms in the White Stuff.

H/t Hannah Robinson’s excellent @secret_unusual guide to Edinburgh “The lodge is designated No. 1 in Scotland & it may well be the oldest Freemason lodge in the world. References are made to it in 1504 & it holds minutes of the oldest Masonic meeting on 31 July 1599, making it the world’s oldest Masonic document.” #Edinburgh
Dec 21, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
“Jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men and immorality of any kind.”

The BBC’s 1948 censorship guidelines - still being applied in the early 1960s.

There was also an embargo on “anything that can be construed as personal abuse of Government Ministers, Party Leaders or MPs.” H/ Juliet Barker’s Frostquake, about the terrible winter of 1962-3
Dec 18, 2022 12 tweets 2 min read
ALLEZ LES BLEUS!!! Merde
Dec 1, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read
The Scotsman Steps: Work Bo. 1059, installed by Martin Creed in 2011. 104 steps connect the Old Town & the New, down the side of the old Scotsman’s offices. Each step is clad in a different marble, sourced from around the world. Up the 33 Calvary steps, & inside the Tardis of a church that is Old St Paul’s, there is a memorial chapel to the dead of the two world wars that contains this eerie painting by Alison Watt: Still.
May 16, 2022 4 tweets 3 min read
Murder, jealousy, greed, surfing, refugees, vicars, ancient Egypt, structuralists, sensational impressions, & Dominic Sandbrook's pleasure island: all feature in today's @TheRestHistory on AGATHA CHRISTIE

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/185…
open.spotify.com/episode/5glIYg…
Putting the Agatha Christie back into Wagatha Christie...
May 15, 2022 6 tweets 5 min read
At Great Tew, in a display of heroism redolent of the Iliad, I defy my #EliteSportsInjury to bowl 6 overs, & PLUNDER a wicket. 2 wickets apiece as well for @TroubledStriker & @theoldbatsman.

@bodleianlibs make 146/7 off their 35 overs.

ALL TO PLAY FOR!!! Honoured, as acting captain, to present @MirandaMalins with her cap.
Apr 28, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Ankylosaurs, I am charmed to learn from @Dave_Hone, may have signalled that they were in the mood for luuuurve by blowing out little inflatable sacs on their noses. Tyrannosaurs, meanwhile, seem just to have bitten each other.
Apr 18, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
The premium set by Christ on sheltering the needy, which the Gospels could hardly make any clearer, is not necessarily helpful to the government of a country richer & less war-torn than most other countries, & which doesn't want to throw open its borders. "One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions."
Apr 15, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
An episode of @TheRestHistory to mark #GoodFriday I should probably just add that parts of it are quite gruesome.
Apr 13, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Tomorrow's episode of @TheRestHistory is on THE CRUCIFIXION That Jesus was not a Roman citizen, that he suffered a slave's death, that crucifixion was the most humiliating form of execution imaginable, has always been for Christians - right from the time of Paul - fundamental to their understanding of who he was.

Apr 12, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
I sit down with @jamiembrixton to watch Pasolini’s Edipo Re… A strong look for the Pythia Image
Apr 7, 2022 21 tweets 8 min read
To my native village, there tomorrow morning to embark on a 35 mile walk to Winchester in aid of @DKMS_uk.

If you felt like sponsoring my niece Daisy, who will be accompanying @James1940, I would be inordinately grateful. To Winchester! Image
Apr 5, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
I love the idea that a British university, by dropping Britain's most signficant female novelist in favour of an American one, is somehow decolonising itself. telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/0… Why don't British humanities departments just admit the truth: that they're absolutely desperate to become outposts of American university culture?
Apr 4, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
I curl up with ⁦@Dave_Hone⁩’s very handsome-looking new book - which, he says in the introduction, “is ultimately about what we DON’T know about dinosaurs.” “We have probably learned more about dinosaurs in the last 20 years than in the previous 200” - @Dave_Hone
Apr 4, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
"I know a fascist when I see one." Foot, so I learned from @dcsandbrook's 'Who Dares Wins,' grew up in a house containing “240 Bibles, 130 volumes by or about Montaigne & 300 by or about Milton, 3,000 tracts from the English Civil War & an entire room on the French Revolution.”
Mar 26, 2022 23 tweets 7 min read
To @Nationalmuseet! The splendidly named aurochs from Vig