iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Now out in ‘print’! I’m still writing about and being tremendously entertained by Metrovick, so please do check this out.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Hope things are (relatively) okay at Edinburgh 🤞

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Unclear. I think they’ve just panicked and thought that no one will have a clue what the Peasant’s Revolt was but will recognise Robin Hood.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I think there trying to suggest that Wat Tyler inspired Robin Hood 🤷‍♂️

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I regret to inform @pseudo-isidore.bsky.social that the marketing team for The Uprising, the film about the Peasant’s Revolt, has bottled it and plastered Robin Hood over everything.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Realised I misspelled Schneer, and his account isn’t perfect - a little too preoccupied with Jimmy Thomas - but I doubt it will be bettered in respect of the actual historical context.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Schemer’s book is by far the best. Torrance takes the revolution hook for its title without seriously challenging the misconception, while Mustill’s is just … fine.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Definitely no. 2 (and the book sounds fascinating).

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I’ve been trying to remember the source! I think he might have been the other Liberal candidate at the same time as AJ Mundella in the 1870s, which is why I would have come across it.

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Reposted by Dr David Vessey

Alan Owlport 🦉 🎃 @alanallport.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Russell Crowe’s Göring in Netflix’s #Nuremberg is genuinely impressive: vain, intelligent, manipulative, unrepentant. And the film gets the courtroom dynamic right: Jackson fumbling the cross-examination before Maxwell Fyfe stepped in to rescue the prosecution. So far, so good. 🧵

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

The most important event you’ve never heard of! Maybe not, but I’m really excited this is finally out as Metrovick is tremendously entertaining and says more about interwar Britain than you might think.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

If students want to sue us for breaking ourselves to get you through your degree course in impossible circumstances, then feel free to mail back your degree certificates. Address on the website of the university you’re now pushing out of business.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Although I note we’re still on the target list of institutions despite going back in person as soon as practicable.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

It’s been catalogued already by Sheffield’s Special Collections. There’s a lot not there about 84-85 it’s fair to say, but some interesting stuff on the 70s.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

There are no cuts on the table beyond a review for certain programmes that was already in place. The UCU seems to want an extended guarantee beyond this year.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Nicked a couple of my articles it seems. Here’s hoping my shocking grammar brings it down from within …

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Sounds similar to our current predicament. What uni is this?

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Does anyone know what the acronym VSO meant in government parlance from the 1930s? It’s a Home Office file on a foreign national’s scientific research, so the latter part is possibly Science Officer. The report makes VSO out to be an individual rather than an organisation.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

I don’t understand the figures in this story. Regrettable though it is, £16.5 million has already been saved from VSS, so there’s no way that there will be 1,000 additional job losses. The UCU are just scoring political points as usual, and I’m as critical of our management as the next person.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Unfortunately not a decision based on an objective analysis, and there are other resources on the chopping block.

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Reposted by Dr David Vessey

erobertlee.bsky.social @erobertlee.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

This is a problem of how we conflate engineering and science. Students using LLMs to write is like building a robot to lift weights for you at the gym. The point of lifting the weights is for your training, not because weights need lifting

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

The Donny DNA is strong. Would certainly kick the arse of Cambridge.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

Hang on, have you been a fellow Doncastrian all this time without me realising?

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Very, very late to this particular party (it’s not my field in fairness), but McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is every bit as great as everyone says it is. A masterpiece.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Our morale is in the toilet. It’s a masterclass in torpedoing performance.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

The excitement when the metrics spot that someone has cited your article, only to find it was me in a subsequent piece indulging in flagrant self-promotion.

media.tenor.com

a cartoon of homer simpson standing in a grassy yard

ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson standing in a grassy yard

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

Very grateful to see so many new followers. On the off chance that you’re kicking your heels on Saturday evening, here’s some links to my recent work. This first piece is on the frankly bonkers Saturday Review in the 1930s: doi.org/10.1093/hisr...

doi.org

Anti-Bolshevism and the periodical press in interwar Britain: the case of the Saturday Review, 1933–6

Abstract. Using the example of the Saturday Review under the ownership of Lady Houston, this article explores how anti-Bolshevism was constituted in interw

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

Too little, too late and pleases no one. If it’s a sticking plaster pending more serious surgery then fair enough, but I’m not hopeful.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 28/10/2024

Not historiography but the first Royal Commission on the Press might have something on N. Ireland. There’s also Coglan’s report from 1936, but I don’t remember it having circulation for local papers.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

Same. With a quill pen and calligraphy.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 30/08/2024

Not a great surprise at that point in 1945 when he’s still in the late ’Uncle Joe’ phase. And there was always a tendency to separate Stalin to some degree from the worst tyrannies of the Bolsheviks in the 1930s.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 23/08/2024

Delighted to finally share this, and open-access too! Journal of Contemporary History, 'Speaking Truth to a Foreign Power: Anti-Bolshevism and Truth in the Early Cold War, 1945–53' - David Vessey, 2024 t.co/amDBE5Hv5f

t.co

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220094241270988

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 07/08/2024

Going deep on the Morrison ‘coup’ that never was?

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 30/07/2024

I do this all the time. Tomorrow I’ll think it’s a pile of stinking turd 😐

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 04/04/2024

The proportion of National Archives users who hit the vino at lunch is hugely impressive.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 08/03/2024

I’m not saying that my writing is becoming too prolix, but the one chapter I intended to write on this particular theme is currently four.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 05/03/2024

Bashed out over 2,500 words today. Some of it might even be printable. Taking the small wins where I can #booktravails

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 25/01/2024

Starting my day by describing George Bernard Shaw as puerile. How’s your day going? 😎

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 05/01/2024

In the latest predictable peer review is broken update, an article I submitted in October is still sat on its virtual shelf awaiting the appointment of reviewers. Every single journal is like this at the moment.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 04/12/2023

The tone is puzzling. He swings between portraying Napoleon as megalomaniacal tyrant and lovesick puppy, with a sprinkle of Norman Wisdom thrown in. Now that I think about it, this sounds more entertaining than it was.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 01/11/2023

ProQuest now periodically checks if I’m a robot while using their databases. Robots, of course, being famous for trawling through the Manchester Guardian from May 1927.

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Dr David Vessey @davidcvessey.bsky.social · 25/10/2023

Historian of modern Britain, specifically the media and political engagement in the mid-twentieth century if you ever need anything reviewing on these subjects 🙂

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