Category Archives: Uncategorized

Since writing a blog post here about newsagents, I have started to research their history more seriously and was recently asked to contribute to a wonderful exhibition of drawings and watercolours of Glasgow newsagents by the artist Will Knight, taking … Continue reading →

I fairly recently came across a school report where I had, when forced to make a ‘pupil comment’, moaned that ‘I’m really rubbish at source work. I spend ages looking at paintings and never find anything to say’. My History … Continue reading →

This is the first in an occasional series of bits of sources and writing that I quite like that no longer fit into the book or an article. This is a orphan text in two ways: not only does this … Continue reading →

‘Where are the women in this thesis?’ Picture the scene: late May or early June 2011, in my PhD supervisor’s office, in my mock viva discussing my thesis on the British publication and reception of Karl Marx’s Capital. I’d like … Continue reading →

I love newsagents. The local newsagent was the first place that I was allowed to walk to on my own, when I was about six or seven, armed with 20p (often in actual pennies) to buy some cola bottles from … Continue reading →

This morning I am contemplating my ‘teaching philosophy’. How’s this for a teaching philosophy? Perhaps his happiest trait was his firm belief, almost an instinctive belief, that what he did was worth doing. He believed in the place, in his … Continue reading →

After an absence of six months, I have decided to use this blog as a kind of notebook again. From September, I am co-teaching a third year course on ‘Historians and Material Culture’. Having learned that the best way to … Continue reading →

Tomorrow I will lead my last seminar at the University of Manchester, where I have taught on and off since 2006 and have been attached to in various capacities for fourteen years. I am very much looking forward to starting … Continue reading →