iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Robin Benn

Alastair Benn @alastairbenn.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

How did Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, become the crucible of Germany's moral collapse? I speak to Katja Hoyer about her new book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. audioboom.com/posts/890048...

audioboom.com

Weimar’s descent into darkness

How did Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, become the crucible of Germany's moral collapse? Katja Hoyer, author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/45...

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Set down your quill! Take up your iPod 120GB! And read Alastair Benn’s account of how to navigate the borderlands between our imagination (Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past’) and the elusive present moments of our modernity:

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Jordan @jordanpfot.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

And he’s in the curling finals! (This video is lovely)

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Our algorithms are trimming our very souls: read this salutary meditation on the modern world, & don’t forget: no Bildung, no Bildungsroman + no Mignon: Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht…

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

“Let’s have more pirates,” they said. Throw in how Shakespeare’s close reading of pre-Existentialist Montaigne informed “To be or not to be” (thus dragging Hamlet out of a Jonsonian Revenge Tragedy and into a colder, more modern world) & this pod becomes essential (& greatly enjoyable) listening:

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Read this! I loved BB’s self-deprecating description of her distinctive topknot as ‘choucroute’ / Sauerkraut - a wonderful article bringing back many happy boyhood screen daydreams ⚜️🇫🇷

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Calton Consort @caltonconsort.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

We're all set for our Midsummer Concert this evening at Canongate Kirk. It was sounding fantastic this morning. Tickets are still available at TicketSource until 5pm and any remaining will be available on the door £15 (£13) U18Free www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/edi...

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Sadie Maskery @saccharinequeen.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

This is part of a thing called "The Last Picnic", which didn't make it into The Usual Apologies, but is part of a series of hybrid splurges of consciousness tentatively entitled Postcards From An Edge. Buy TUA, show me, and I will send you a hand drawn postcard from an edge. #Poetry #BribeOrThreat

Black and white photo of a table, overgrown with weeds and thorns, on which stacked plates, upturned cups and bowls are still visible.

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Do read this! From Robert Louis Stevenson to Numberwang, via Croydon, Slough and Hackney, to the emergence of a new, and gentle, seam of English pastoral comedy (Mackenzie Crook’s The Detectorists and Will Sharpe’s Flowers) that helps glimpse life’s mysteriousness:

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

A really great podcast. Listen out for Tallis, Mozart, Wagner, Ted Heath(!) +reflections on the sad sidelining of <élitist> classics, compared with the real joys of music making for all: playing the cello, singing in choirs, conducting youth orchestras, playing Solti’s Ring Cycle on a 60s phonogram…

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Is George Smiley the still-abiding spirit of the post-war era, and does spy fiction help us to parse our new/old world and its actors? Your conclusions will be thoroughly enlivened by this podcast, with both David Omand (not C, but nearly) and Pauline Blistène:

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Muriel Zagha @murielzagha.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Thank you, @bennrobin.bsky.social! Goodness knows how much we all need re-enchantment. And chant/chanson too.

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

As @murielzagha.bsky.social writes, it is often (especially on Mondays) “as though the medium of chanson is used to disrupt and re-enchant the ordinariness of everyday life and its tiresome repetitiveness”. Happy reading (& listening - some wonderful links):

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

The ‘note of civet is evaporating from our cultural life’ remarks Jenny McCartney - catch it (if that’s the right word) while you can in this fascinating essay, along with pungent doses of Hogarth, Zola and Sickert:

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

A most literate (& elegantly alarming) exposition of the post- or even anti-literate era we appear to be entering: do listen (and/or watch!):

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

The great Andrew Wilton’s tour d’horizon of a century of printmaking and his insights into the abiding and dynamic influence of Turner himself on the course of this mechanical art are very much worth reading:

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Samira Ahmed @samiraahmeduk.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Wonderful story. Deservedly on the front page.

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

This is a picture of Dylan as Goethe’s greatest wanderer, Chaucer’s man in the crowd, who sees everything and sets out to tell us all the condition of each one of us. Do read this (before seeing the excellent film) by @alastairbenn.bsky.social at the ever-more-essential @engelsbergideas.bsky.social

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Alastair Benn @alastairbenn.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

No other living artist has so successfully and for so long lit up the vastness of the American experiment as Bob Dylan, as an ambitious, knowing biopic reveals. My latest for @engelsbergideas.bsky.social: engelsbergideas.com/reviews/bob-...

engelsbergideas.com

Bob Dylan, the last of the best

No other living artist has so successfully and for so long lit up the vastness of the American experiment as Bob Dylan, as an ambitious, knowing biopic reveals.

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Alastair Benn @alastairbenn.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

The public's appetite for intellectual stimulation is now being met by podcasts. The risks to the written word may prove existential. My latest for @engelsbergideas.bsky.social: engelsbergideas.com/notebook/pod...

engelsbergideas.com

Podcasts v the written word

The public's appetite for intellectual stimulation is now being met by podcasts. The risks to the written word may prove existential.

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Do come on 14th December (this Saturday already!). Also, do like the choir’s page for news of lots more choral delights in the New Year:

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Robin Benn @bennrobin.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

This is a brilliant article - typical of the excellent (& paywall free) content at @engelsbergideas.bsky.social

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Simon Spanton @simonguy.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

A picture taken seven years ago. A merchant's and shipper's office in Leith, Edinburgh. Gone now.

An old, dilapidated, blue-painted shop front with three pillars and recessed doorway on the righthand side. Worn and peeling and boarded-up. The company name, written across the lintel in white serif capitals, is "Beldam Lascar."

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Belinda @stonerwitch.bsky.social · 04/12/2023

If you're like me, #TheArchers lone fan in your house, under 80 and a tiny bit mental, you'll LOVE @thecidershedpod.bsky.social with that "nasty" woman and the ascorbic man. Just kidding, they're bloody lovely humans -the sort you'd want a pint with.

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Reposted by Robin Benn

Helen Day @lbflyawayhome.bsky.social · 03/04/2024

‘Robin’ Artist: Ronald Lampitt (Birds and how they Live, 1965)

Close-up of a robin in song, perched on a blossoming twig. In the background, there is a grey sky and the bare branches of trees just coming back into life.

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