You can/should read Emily Wilson's latest take on the Odyssey, but I'm logging on to convey my hairdresser's reaction. She was AGHAST that Nolan, with his million $ budget, gave Matt Damon ONLY 6 hair extensions. As a result, his hair did not blow around properly, & that ruined the film for her.

📢PROJECT UPDATE📢 You may have seen the news that the University of Exeter, home of the wills project, has placed 500 academics at risk of redundancy. The project leader Prof. Jane Whittle & project co-investigator Dr Laura Sangha are both at risk, alongside almost all of the History department. 1/

Some positive (!) announcements for UK research and scholarship from @leverhulme.ac.uk

Leverhulme Trust@leverhulme.ac.uk · 6d ago

As part of the Trust’s centenary commitment, the Trust Board is pleased to announce three new partnerships to strengthen the UK’s world-leading research base, providing direct support to underrepresented scholars at the earliest stages of their research career.

As part of the Trust’s centenary commitment, the Trust Board is pleased to announce three new partnerships to strengthen the UK’s world-leading research base, providing direct support to underrepresented scholars at the earliest stages of their research career.

The Leverhulme Trust, as part of its major (£100 million) centenary investment in UK research, has announced 3 new partnerships designed to enhance opportunities for underrepresented groups at the early stages of research careers. @leverhulme.ac.uk Terrifically good news, and sorely needed. 1/3

In Verona, scene is laid.

Sunken Ships, Shakespeare, and Whale Watching open.substack.com/pub/shakespe... An evocative post from Callan Davies on all things watery and Shakespearean, from a Swedish warship to whales in Suffolk.

Sunken Ships, Shakespeare, and Whale Watching

Maritime Shakespeare, Stockholm's extraordinary Vasa Museum, and whales in early modern East Anglia

open.substack.com

Reflections on a recent trip to Stockholm’s Vasa Museum (showcasing a retrieved 1628 warship that had lain in tact at the bottom of the brackish Baltic sea) and some Shakespearean resonances that came to mind in today’s new post: open.substack.com/pub/shakespe...

Sunken Ships, Shakespeare, and Whale Watching

Maritime Shakespeare, Stockholm's extraordinary Vasa Museum, and whales in early modern East Anglia

open.substack.com

The @britsciassoc.bsky.social Festival is coming to Southampton and the programme is live 🔬 🗓️ 16–20 September 2026 🎟️ Free tickets now available Join us for one of the UK’s biggest celebrations of science, browse and book events here 👉 https://britishsciencefestival.pulse.ly/qu115wdmak

Business leaders back the Humanities and Social Sciences, noting their important to economy and culture in Exeter, Cornwall and the Southwest. This is one vital strand in defending the SHAPE subjects. Don't ignore it (or carp about it). Build on it. biz4humanities.com

A depressingly long list of universities who are implementing cuts and redundancies, as well as the petitions and actions against them (via @onslies.bsky.social) qmucu.org/qmul-transfo.... This is a national emergency that should be responded to with national policy.

UK HE shrinking

a live page of all the redundancies and restructures happening across UK Higher Education. Page is updated regularly.

qmucu.org

Also working-class autodidacts didn't just read alone - they read in groups, set up libraries and reading rooms, and battled for Mechanics' Institutes (many long ago merged into unis) to teach music, history, and politics. They built the public adult education infrastructure that's being destroyed

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · last mo.

This misses the point. Self-education has become more accessible in the last 20 years than at any point in history, though not through ‘amateur reading’. The problem isn’t access to information but learning how to evaluate it critically - and that brings us back to universities (and Humanities)

I'm getting so very tired of doing this every time these pundits do their whole 'I had a world class education, but maybe you shouldn't?' spiel: James Marriot studied English Literature at Oxford.

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · last mo.

This misses the point. Self-education has become more accessible in the last 20 years than at any point in history, though not through ‘amateur reading’. The problem isn’t access to information but learning how to evaluate it critically - and that brings us back to universities (and Humanities)

Exeter made me a researcher, and I owe much to colleagues there past and present and so admire their scholarship and broader championship of our field. These cuts are evidently senseless, counterproductive, and cruel. I hope the union, petition, and other pressure…

Francesca Stavrakopoulou@proffrancesca.bsky.social · last mo.

I’d love it if you’d sign this. It might not prevent me and my colleagues losing our jobs, but it will draw attention to the ideological vandalism being perpetrated by the wealthy execs running our university. Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter - sign the petition below! c.org/NpvY4sR9gH

Finally got round to reupholstering our kitchen chairs with thanks to a wedding gift voucher for the material. It was previously clad in my grandma’s 1950s(?) velveteen (with a vaguely sinister hint of the human circulatory system). Now new and geometric and a bit more us.

I’d love it if you’d sign this. It might not prevent me and my colleagues losing our jobs, but it will draw attention to the ideological vandalism being perpetrated by the wealthy execs running our university. Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter - sign the petition below! c.org/NpvY4sR9gH

Sign the Petition

Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter

c.org

A long time in the making, Reprints & Revivals of Renaissance Drama, which I edited with Harry Newman (a long time friend), is now out! It's a collection about forms of renewal in print & performance & their importance to the production & reception of early modern drama.

5 years of flowering and these geraniums still going strong.

This week, Andy Burnham – an English graduate with a love of poetry – stepped closer to becoming Prime Minister. Andy’s remarkable journey embodies the central message of the #EnglishCreates campaign: this subject has the potential to enrich lives, open up opportunities, and shape the future.

This is one of the dumbest and saddest things I've ever seen. We should not think of universities in this way, and if we do that'll destroy everything that is both useful and good about them. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Find out which university degrees could earn you most across your lifetime

New data suggests which university degrees have the highest and lowest financial returns over a lifetime.

bbc.co.uk

A statement from Exeter UCU branch @ucu.org.uk - please share far and wide.

'On average, graduates earn more than non-graduates – even when we adjust for differences based on background characteristics or prior attainment. And on average, the exchequer also sees a substantial lifetime return from state investment in educating an individual to graduate level'. 2/3

The news of brutal cuts to the Arts and Humanities at Exeter and elsewhere highlights the self-destructive nature of the ´strategies’ being pursued across UK HE. Exeter’s English Dept was rated the best research unit in English in the country in RAE 2008. 1/4

The cuts at Exeter University won't work. They never work. The high-ups will be back for more in a year or two, then even more a year or two after that. Unis just keep doing the same thing consultants tell them to do, over and over again. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

University of Exeter in talks to cut about 150 members of staff

The university says it is consulting with colleagues over "limited and specific potential changes".

bbc.co.uk

A dramatic account of Stratford-upon-Avon’s social world gone wrong… with a few other dispatches from the archive: open.substack.com/pub/shakespe...

Murder in Shakespeare's Stratford

Barfights and backgammon in a 17th-century market town

open.substack.com

Over the next two weeks, we feature the 8 articles and 8 monographs shortlisted for the Society's 2026 Early Career Article and First Book Prizes. Today: 'Domestic labor and white Creole womanhood in Jamaica, ca.1865–1938', by Liz Egan, published in 'Journal of British Studies' #Skystorians 1/2

Googling pseudonymous early modern tracts now often produces a hallucinated scholarly attribution. At first I would check the evidence, wondering if I'd missed something. Here's an example of how it makes up a scholarly consensus on attribution: Robert Parsons, Matthew Grove, Anthony Munday...

Nearly 40% of schoolleavers (should be more re “growth” in other major economies) become graduates, making them one of the largest shared interest groups in British society across coming decades. But sure, that’s under 50%, so sacrifice them to The Taxpayer (presumably not these specific taxpayers).

A lovely piece

London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 2mo ago

‘Eighty years on, 𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 stands as an astute meditation on repression and madness. Time, however, has dulled the cultural historical implications. The absence of references to the war only makes its agonies, invisibly encoded, more traumatic.’ Malcolm Gaskill: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...