1. Lost England, a gallery of photos from 1870 to 1930 from The Guardian to start with today, including one of the labour-intensive construction of the Manchester ship canal in 1889 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2016/nov/28/lost-england-photographs-from-1870-to-1930

2. The longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize includes books written in ten languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Romanian and Spanish. https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-international-booker-prize-2025

3. A recent post from Timothy Snyder – both audio and text versions – on his blog, Thinking About, Crossing a line: borders between one kind of life and another https://snyder.substack.com/p/crossing-a-line-audio-and-text

I am on a night train from Kyiv, bound for Zaporizhzhia, a city in the southeast of Ukraine which is about twenty miles from the front. Russian missiles take about thirty-five seconds to hit the city, and the take civilian lives. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In September of 2022 the Russian parliament proclaimed the annexation of the region as a whole. That front is a line that runs through Zaporizhzhia region, and indeed across the east and south of Ukraine. My train rushes southeast, towards that line. Its passengers, civilians and soldiers alike, know what lies on the other side. Given the nature of Russian occupation, Ukrainians are fighting not only for their lives, but for a certain idea of life in freedom.

If you’ve time, listen to the audio version.

Plus a poem, What War Is, by Ostap Slyvynsky https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-war-is

4. Catch this one if you can on March 6^th at 14:00 UK time, David Crystal on The Future of English. Register here https://futureofenglish.britishcouncil.org/research-forum-25 Not the first time that David has spoken on this topic over the years!

5. And, finally, the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon https://youtu.be/9EDo38geLgo?feature=shared Or maybe not?!