Ethel Mannin’s AN AMERICAN JOURNEY is being republished in May by Boiler House Press thanks to Brad Bigelow who is the force behind @neglectedbooks.com
There is a story here: Back in 2023, I had been posting photos from my trips on the Greyhound bus. Brad saw them & got in touch asking if I… (1)
07.03.2026 09:52
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Contending moral positions seem to presuppose a reference to some shared impersonal standard, yet the poverty of current arguments and the characteristically shrill mode in which they are uttered suggest strongly that there is no such standard.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre (2007)
27.02.2026 14:04
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Yes Kirrie is landlocked but North Sea Poets will be there, live, in a kirk on Good Friday. Poetry and music - join us! Details below.
26.02.2026 22:31
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Your Staff Expenses Claim has entered workflow
Seven words that will drive your lover wild
25.02.2026 20:08
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‘We need to be intensely curious up to a point, but we must decide what our goal is, in order to move strongly in a direction and not be all over the place.’
from her interview with www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/eacuteliane-...
25.02.2026 09:26
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I can't wait for this. Come roam the streets of Berlin with me...
24.02.2026 12:48
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Fear of being flagged by AI detectors drives stress among students
Increased use of new technologies accompanied by rising fear of being accused of cheating, with many universities’ policies on what is acceptable still unclear
YouGov polling 'commissioned by student support company Studiosity' finds that students are stressed by being accused of misusing AI in assessments.
Absent from the article is any mention of Studiosity's intensified UK marketing of its AI tools for student assessments. Conflict of interest?
23.02.2026 09:47
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‘Imagine a cross between a Pevsner guide, Ian Nairn at his most bilious, Herman Melville and (particularly) Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, (Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien)…Mardell does for New Lynn what an earlier writer did for the city of Dublin.’
18.02.2026 10:32
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Toni Morrison, born on this day in 1931. This, from her ‘The Source of Self-Regard’ collection:
18.02.2026 09:07
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“Freak maps”, utterly chilling…
14.02.2026 08:41
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Still, thinking of what’s happening as the rule of rentiers, who are getting their interests served at the expense of the real economy, helps make sense of the situation.
Paul Krugman NYT 6 June 2011
[things are worse now]
archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blog...
13.02.2026 13:07
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Poet, traveller, novelist but probably it’s his essays will live on and on…
12.02.2026 17:05
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And now for a dose of proper morning light from Reykjavík…
12.02.2026 09:06
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“I believe, if you were made of rocks, I would love you with such faith that I could make you run to me.” Michelangelo casting himself as Pygmalion.
12.02.2026 08:46
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But what’s on the menu?
11.02.2026 09:07
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Kevin Ayers with Robert Wyatt etc improvisation ILEA TV 1972
YouTube video by Nuthatch
Lots to marvel at here, but marvel most at the fact that this went out in the schools programme education slot on a weekday. "The past is a foreign country". Not if you spoke the language.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7xi...
10.02.2026 14:06
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“Being present is another way of staying awake, of being in touch with your own mind, being connected with other people, of making space for exuberance amid so much terror and heartbreak. The smile that Bad Bunny flashed throughout his show looked very real to me.”
Another fine piece by Niela Orr
10.02.2026 14:31
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From the horse’s mouth
10.02.2026 09:28
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@andotherstories.bsky.social are a properly decent, fine and determined publisher. They are bringing back into print A Chancer, The Busconductor Hines and Kieron Smith, boy.
Here are some words from James Kelman:
08.02.2026 21:16
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A sleepover plan
Wouldn't you like to be 8 again?
08.02.2026 16:41
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This portion of the play Sir Thomas More, is attributed to Shakespeare. It was written (but suppressed) around the time of the anti-immigrant riots in 1593 and the protests of a thousand English apprentices two years later against incoming workers:
08.02.2026 10:57
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Gray Day 2025 marks 45 years of Lanark. Alasdair Gray’s novel, published by @canongate.co.uk, fuses visual art and text: self-designed covers, allegorical panels, Glasgow landscapes, and an eccentric 3-1-2-4 structure—learn more about the familiar faces he used for the book cover 👇🏽
07.02.2026 10:09
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Only seven days to go.
Get your orders in…
07.02.2026 09:56
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Well-timed, finely-written lunch shows how gambling has embedded itself in global finance.
And a smart recommendation from ‘Western Mash’ in the Comments section below:
‘I first learned about prediction markets from The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)’
07.02.2026 09:27
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I was born at Portsmouth, an English seaport town principally remarkable for mud, Jews, and Sailors, on the 7th of February 1812. My father holding in those days a situation under Government in the Navy Pay Office…I came to London, a child of two years old.’
Dickens, Letters, Vol. 1, p. 465
07.02.2026 08:45
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recognizing perceiving resolving anticipating identifying teasing
05.02.2026 10:39
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