1. If Christmas is something you simply can’t ignore in your part of the world, Onestopenglish have a variety of resources for Christmas lessons here, many of which (not all) are free to access https://www.onestopenglish.com/

2. OUP have clearly been taken to task for not practising what they preach. “We hope”, they say, “that you enjoyed our paper on Multimodality – but you may be asking yourself “Why wasn’t it multimodal?” Ask no more! We’ve created a digital, interactive version of the paper filled with videos and resources to help you explore the topic more easily!” Better late than never and it works well! https://oup.pagetiger.com/oup-multimodality-in-elt/nov-2023

3. Bookpocalypse: AI and the Risks to Literature and Free Expression was the title of the annual English PEN HG Wells Lecture that Monica Ali gave at the end of last month in Newcastle, exploring the threat that AI may pose to novelists and creatives in the future https://youtu.be/BWD4P5VFtrQ?feature=shared

The transcript of Monica’s lecture is here https://pentransmissions.com/2023/12/01/bookpocalypse-ai-and-the-risks-to-literature-and-free-expression/

and a reminder that the PEN blog, Transmissions, is here https://pentransmissions.com/

4. Three from BBC Radio 4 that I’ve enjoyed on my way up and down the A1 between Cambridge and Richmond recently:

i) Andrew Scott’s reading of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in ten fifteen-minute episodes https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09rx6hl

 ii) this year’s Reith Lectures by Ben Ansell, Our Democratic Future, in which he asks how we can make politics work for all of us in the 21st century https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9 The last lecture of the four is broadcast tomorrow.

iii) Annie Ernaux’s The Years, miraculously compressed https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001t2xz

5. And, finally and soothingly, Sheep in Winter by John Clare https://poets.org/poem/sheep-winter