Malcolm Quinn
Professor of Cultural and Political History UAL, Honorary Professor Bentham Project UCL. Thinks about anti-aesthetics. Read a chapter of my academic work for free:
discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10096746/…
- An anti-corruption crusade is Starmer’s only option atm.
- Toppling is our specialty.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnThe university funding crisis finally starting to make it into newspaper editorials www.ft.com/content/82f5...
- I think this might be the biggest political scandal of the century.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnUtilitarian philosopher R.M. Hare has a discussion about how to bring up your kids if you were solely concerned with their happiness. He says: teach them not to seek happiness directly but be nice to people, make some true friends, get an absorbing hobby and a fulfilling job, be a good neighbour etc
- Hands up those who are interested in a power vacuum in UK.
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn[This post could not be retrieved]
- Starmer will either go big or go home. He should start by diverting the Thames through the House of Lords.
- A shameless ripoff of Robert Rauschenberg.
- Angel that looked like Giorgia Meloni removed from Rome church fresco | Italy europesays.com/2754975/ The face of a winged angel bearing a striking resemblance to the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has…
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnProfessors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’ www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/u...
- Washing dishes and listening to the wrong version of ‘Four Last Songs’.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnWe gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn"You may be skeptical about machine-written work at first, but once you see the software rearranging familiar-seeming paragraphs into different orders and changing a few words, you’ll realize it’s a suitable replacement for your favorite authors, who can now rest and starve."
- A savage irony if the prince of darkness ends the career of a hitherto unblemished PM.
- I just saw a post that said current events show us that capitalism is ending. I don’t think so. I’m pretty certain that consumer society is ending, that is, the era when the focus of capitalism was on the masses. However, capitalism seems happy to continue by focusing on 500 billionaires instead.
- An artificial academy. What could possibly go wrong?
- As expected, LK avoids the two obvious questions, the first ‘how did Britain sink so low?’ the second ‘what effect does boosting Reform as a future government have on ethnic minorities in UK?’
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- Every day the British media tells us to take these losers seriously. And so our national humiliation continues.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnChaotic carnival of chancers latest: - Jenrick and Braverman vote FOR the abolition of the two child limit while the other four Reform MPs vote against - and of course Farage doesn’t even bother turning up to do his job
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- Well the eye of Sauron really sliced through Britain today. Maybe the PM made him angry.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnMore likely they're scared that they'll lose of a few of their very questionable Lords.
- The title ‘learning to be human in the age of AI’ is not very useful. How about ‘learning why non-thinking entities are being plugged into higher education systems’?
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn1. Interesting to see Reform abandon its flirtation with nativism / birth rate boosterism in favour of the policy of the last Tory government 2. “Starve a kid for a cheaper pint” is quite the policy. Be interested to see how that performed in focus groups (especially all male versus mixed).
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnOn Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's interesting approach to time travel in 'Memories of the Future' (1/7)
- ‘No government discloses adverse information easily or voluntarily, or indeed often at all … Little or nothing, however, can stop a government disclosing documents that adversely affect others.’
- NEW On the disclosure of Mandelson's emails How to think about disclosed documentary evidence By me at emptycity.substack.com/p/on-the-dis...
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnPeter Thiel has been open about this for a long time. Trump is a way to break the republic, which can then be replaced by “free economic zones” with oligarchs as dictators and tech as a taskmaster for helpless humans without any rights. (1/2)
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn3 February 1915 | Pole Jan Baraś Komski was born in Bircza. A painter; He arrived at #Auschwitz on 14 June 1940 in the first transport of Poles (no. 564). He escaped on 29 December 1942, was imprisoned again (no. 152884), transferred to Buchenwald, Gross-Rosen & Dachau. He survived.
- So the noble destiny of Russia was to get bogged down in a war that it can’t win without the support of foreign powers?
- Putin tells Russians that they invaded Ukraine to fulfill Russia's destiny. So much for the lies about NATO and the EU fed to us by Russia's tools like Farage, Gill, and Arron Banks. (Via @berlinbridge.bsky.social)
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn[This post could not be retrieved]
- ‘We should take over the voting’. Democracy is in the rear view mirror.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnA good thing happened today: Haitians in Springfield, Ohio and elsewhere are (for now) safe from the planned ethnic cleansing operation. This happened because people came together — organizers, reporters, and those who care — and made it happen. Let’s take the win and continue the work.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnIn tonight’s talk, I began by asking the students to define abstraction and figuration, then I asked them to choose one or the other. I went on to outline a possible world in which abstraction was the only right choice, thus introducing terms of engagement for Victor Pasmore and Herbert Read.
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnDefinitely seems like they destroyed the country on purpose.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnBreaking from Met Police on Mandelson: “The Met has received a number of reports relating to alleged misconduct in a public office. The reports will all be reviewed to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation.”
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- In Brockwell Park.
- There is a consensus that people will vote for a further tightening of the vice. This is because journalists can’t stop feeding Reform, the big fat cuckoo in the nest of UK politics.
- ‘abstract art is still being made; it is one option among many others. But that is precisely the difference: for Newman and frenemies it was everything – the origin and end, the alpha and omega, of art.’
- Wonderful to see Hal Foster recommend Amy Newman’s biography of Barnett Newman in @lrb.co.uk!
- British politics in February 2026. We have been trapped in the vice of Brexit for ten years. One political bloc is in favour of loosening the vice, another bloc wants to tighten it.
- We watched the first episode of ‘The Studio’, which, as well as paying homage to Robert Altman’s brilliant ‘The Player’, also captures Jeremy Bentham’s dilemma in ‘A Picture of the Treasury’ (1802) - what if you are paid to make something with the proviso that it never gets made?
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- ‘For my children, this is their first Mandelson resignation. I hope that they will treasure it.’
- What's that? Peter Mandelson resigning from something again? FIRE UP THE (OLD) SKETCH! thecritic.co.uk/oh-m...
- Not for long, as it happens.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnHot off the press - a letter from the Exec Chair of @ukri.org explaining his plans and in particular the financial position of STFC. It notes curiosity driven research is protected and will make up around half of UKRI spend over the coming period www.ukri.org/news/open-le...
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnAmazon has placed a VERY specific product warning on the published edition of the Kenneth Williams diaries. The incident that prompted this surely deserved more media attention.
- T.S. Eliot in Dublin 1940: ‘Apart from that the Irish have a certain respect for poetry and religion, theirs is a tiring society’. Strange how the prejudice that sheltered him then, exposes him now.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnWhen I studied American politics in late 1980s, the constitutional law examples were a little dated: some FDR here, some LBJ there. But nothing really for 20 years. Now it would all be just about this last year alone. Constitutional law should not be this eventful.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnGoodwin must die a little inside each time he's out for pints and a curry with the Reform lads. You can pretend as much as you want that you're happy to be sitting next to Lee Anderson as he farts his way through a prawn vindaloo but we all know it's killing him.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnAmong new exhibitions in London in February: Georges Seurat at the Courtauld Gallery Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery Samurai at the British Museum Ramses & the Pharaoh's Gold at Battersea Power Station These & more in our preview: art-exhibitions.blogspot.com/2026/01/new-...
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinnwhat the hell is Woody Allen & Epstein's "step trip" no wait i don't want to know
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnRoland Barthes’s Seminar on the Metaphor of the Labyrinth, and the presentations by Marcel Detienne, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Rosenstiehl progressivegeographies.com/2026/02/01/r...
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnLike Céline, but without the talent.
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnI wouldn’t call Reform nationalists. They are the handmaids of billionaires. But any non-racist party that beat them would be fine by me.
- Reposted by Malcolm Quinn✅ Clarkson is right, people aren’t voting Reform for policies 👉there aren’t any. It’s a protest vote powered by nostalgia not a plan for future. Reform use farming as a prop. Their real plan is USA trade deal, hormone-treated imports and they’ve appointed Ben Goldsmith 🔗 archive.ph/2026.01.31-0...
- Reposted by Malcolm QuinnJUST IN: Democrats flip a red seat in the Texas Senate. Taylor Rehmet wins against Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist who helped lead right-wing efforts to take over TX school boards. With all early vote, and 95% of precincts, in, Dem up 57/43. Trump won this seat by 17% in Tarrant County.