Claude Willan
Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in English Studies at Durham.
Opinions are mine alone but probably should also be those of my employer.
- Flomping around the house in cardigan and slippers, saying things to my kid like no darling because we have to think of your diet. I'm so in my forties it's sobering.
- Knocked a large, full cup of coffee directly into my lap, woolly cardigan and trousers drenched. I smell like a newsroom would smell if there were any left.
- I did it! I made grownup food for lunch!
- Kids appear to be playing Credit Default Swap; i hear the older yelling "LET'S SELL OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY!"
- As much as I despise everything Suella Braverman has done, and as much as I wish she had gotten an innocuous job doing almost anything else, that Tory statement questioning her "mental health" was purest misogyny. Actually such a vile statement I bet she felt nostalgic.
- Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes Were stol'n, unequal, nay dull many Times. [...] But that his Plays, embroider'd up and down With Wit and Learning, justly pleas'd the Town, In the same Paper I as freely own So -- which play(s) of Dryden's did Rochester like? All for Love?
- Adeel Akhtar just gave an absolutely lovely Desert Island discs. With back to back bangers to boot.
- It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man, working from home at 2pm, and in want of a snack, will somehow end up on his knees scraping ice out of the freezer.
- The curse of ambition is its fulfillment, I say, being ironical. They stare at me. What do you do, they repeat. Parties, man
- Part of the magic of Burial's Untrue is that you can't tell if it evokes the sublimity of multistory carparks or of radial housing estates, of Nissan Sentras or Honda Accords, of KFC or Chicken Cottage, of metropolis or suburb.
- "Murderous purge reveals differing interpretations of free speech, equality"
- Reposted by Claude Willan[Not loaded yet]
- My Tom Gauld Myriorama arrived last week from @shandyhall.bsky.social -- I could not recommend Shandy Hall more. I can't think of a place honouring and exploring a writer's legacy with more wit and ingenuity.
- Since moving to the UK, my children have started incorporating CCTV cameras into their imaginative play. Albeit at a technologically-shallow level, I think that's a pretty infallible indicator of a surveillance society.
- You can still pick up my book, Literary Authority, and scores of other much better books, with a nice discount!
- I ended my intro undergrad lecture on the Couplet with this one by Maggie Millner today (thanks to @kasiaiskasia.bsky.social for the recommendation!), meaning I talked 300 undergrads through this couplet right after spending ten minutes on one by Pope. It was wonderful.
- When I listen to music sometimes I imagine a composer, a young Sibelius, say, hearing Prelude à l'apres-midi d'un Faun, and being just absolutely beside himself, in joy, in horror or sublimity. This is fucking life itself, he must have thought. And it is.
- Thanks for this generous advert! Do come to our panel on life writing at 4.40! #bsecs
- Reposted by Claude Willan[Not loaded yet]
- One joy of visiting the place you went to university is seeing other middle aged people grumbling about how their favourite places are no longer there
- I think it's important to affirm fundamental truths sometimes. So in that spirit I say, fuck Birmingham New Street
- It has been heartbreaking in a new way to love England's cricket team this #Ashes bc the dysfunction of the team's culture mirrors national tendencies at their worst. We deserved to get a thrashing, and we did.
- The older I get, the less New Year's celebrations annoy me. the idea of wanting a fresh start seems less and less contemptible and more and more like something everyone wants, sometimes.
- When you're in a cosy pub and you see people coming round looking for a table and they can't get one, it feels even cosier
- The word post-coital was actually coined to describe the vocal cadences of Radio 3 announcers on December 26th
