iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Some slight possible flaring on Morrissey’s jeans here? And who knows what happens to Marr’s below the knees

Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths probably not wearing flares

110 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Can’t think why they’ve banned him

A cranky campaign group opposing Covid vaccines had a stand. The most prominent display in the hall was selling gold bullion. A photograph of a beaming Farage loomed over it: 'Protect your wealth in uncertain times' Last year, Direct Bullion paid Farage £280,000 to record a handful of promotional ads that ran on GB News. Nearby a firm was selling cryptocurrency. Another stand selling gold gave me a chocolate coin and an invitation to 'explore the opportunity. The co-owner, a burly white Zimbabwean, told me gold was ideal for hiding money 'from the prying eyes of banks'. When I said I was a journalist he quickly started talking about Know Your Customer checks. 'We take compliance very seriously, he assured me.

041 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Name a movie where the title character isn’t the main character

M•G•M's
ACCLAIMED PRODUCTION
OF
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S
JULIUS CAESAR
MARLON BRANDO * JAMES MASON
as MARK ANTONY
as BRUTUS
JOHN GIELGUD * LOUIS CALHERN
as CASSIUS
as JULIUS CAESAR
EDMOND O'BRIEN NO GREER GARSON
as CASCA
as CALPURNIA
DEBORAH KERR
as PORTIA

020 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

An oldish piece on Milman Parry, with some thoughts (by way of Walter Ong) on the ways that new technologies affect not only how we tell stories, but also how we think about old stories, including Homer’s. From handwriting to printing to gramophones to movie cameras. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In the introduction to his father’s collected papers, Adam Parry acknowledges that ‘each of the specific tenets that make up Parry’s view of Homer had been held by some former scholar ... Parry’s achievement was to see the connection between these disparate contentions and observations.’ In 1962 Walter Ong argued that ‘Parry’s special type of interest in Homer was made possible by the fact that he lived when the typographical era was breaking up.’ Adam Parry was unconvinced by this, but the arrival of ‘an age of secondary orality’, as Ong put it, ‘the orality of telephones, radio and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence’, must have made it easier to imagine, however imperfectly, the ‘primary oral cultures’ that existed (and in places still exist) before the invention of writing. The newsreels that reported the assassination of King Alexander are worlds away from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and would have been scripted, but they still used formulaic phrases – ‘a hail of lead’, ‘this foul deed’ – to tell, out loud, different versions of the same story, of a voyage across the Mediterranean and the violent death of a king.

150 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Changing trains in Florence, tile for a side trip to the Bargello www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

120 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Percy Shelley died otd 1822. A terrible person in many ways, at times a truly brilliant poet. A few years ago I wrote about Nora Crook’s superb edition of ‘The Triumph of Life’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

By the time of his death on 8 July 1822, a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, the adolescent opening of Queen Mab - 'How wonderful is death!' - had evolved into a hopeless question: "Then, what is Life?' Shelley had no answer, but he puts the question in a poem that rushes relentlessly on, spiralling back on itself through extremes of euphoria and despair, redrawing the bounds of what had been thought possible in English verse, until it is abruptly cut off.

120 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

In case you’re wondering what ‘this’ is, it’s this: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In June 1935 they met Avdo Međedović, ‘our Yugoslav Homer’, a farmer in his sixties living near Bijelo Polje, a town in north-eastern Montenegro. He told Vujnović his life story – his nine years in the army brought to an end by a bullet to his left arm; his marriage at the age of 29 to a woman he’d never met; his career as a butcher ruined by his son’s gambling debts; his son disappearing to join the army – and he played the gusle and sang nine songs over the course of six weeks. ‘He sat cross-legged on the bench,’ Lord wrote a few years later, ‘sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered.’ One of Međedović’s epics was as long as the Odyssey.

120 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Brian Stone on the devastating heatwave that swept over Europe in 2003, from his excellent book The City and The Coming Climate, which I reviewed 13 years ago. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

In all, the EU estimated that more than 70,000 citizens of 12 countries died from heat-induced illnesses over a four-month period in the summer of 2003. This number represents more fatalities than have resulted from any EU or American conflict since World War Two or any natural disaster (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes and floods) to have ever struck a developed nation. It dwarfs the 1800 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and effectively renders trivial the 900 lives lost during the highly publicised Sars epidemic that struck in the same year as the heatwave ... Americans would need to experience more than 20 terrorist attacks equivalent in destruction to 9/11 before such a death toll would be approached. Yet the global response to this climate event, an event that reveals more about the profoundly changing environment in which we now live than any other yet endured, has largely been one of indifference.

1114 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Always a pleasure to be cited in the Financial Times (the review in question: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...)

This absence of edge can at times lead to a lack of narrative tension in her fiction. “Everyone’s so tiresomely friendly and co-operative all the time,” the London Review of Books complained of Bel Canto, in which a group of hostages becomes enmeshed with their captors.

060 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Did he cross the Midlands in a sealed train

Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor and potential Labour leadership candidate, has arrived at Euston in London today, the Telegraph is reporting. It is not known yet why he is in the capital.

050 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

The least of this - or perhaps not - is that Dawkins is writing a novel! How will it compare to E.O. Wilson’s? www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Wilson wants his novel to show how alike ants and people are. ‘There are of course vast differences between ants and men,’ he writes in the prologue. 'But in fundamental ways their cycles are similar. There is something genetic about this convergence. Because of it, ants are a metaphor for us, and we for them.' We routinely use figurative language drawn from the human sphere when talking about ants - queen, soldier, worker - and there's a long literary history of comparing people to ants: the Trojan soldiers leaving Carthage in Book Four of the Aeneid, for example. But in both cases it's important not to confuse resemblance with identity. Anthill means to

resemblance with identity. Anthill means to continue the project Wilson began in Sociobiology (1975), arguing (with some rather unpleasant implications) that human social relations are biologically determined, that in some fundamental and important way - 'there is something genetic about this convergence' - people are just like ants. And yet what Anthill actually demonstrates is the precise opposite. Wilson's human characters may exhibit antlike behaviour, but that proves nothing because they're so unlike real human beings. While his ants - and this is a rare and marvellous achievement - are absolutely nothing like people either.

110 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

I sometimes think that Bomber, as well as being Deighton’s best novel, and the first written on a word processor (I’m also confident Pynchon read it while writing Gravity’s Rainbow), may be the best novel by an Englishman not only about but since the Second World War www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Bomber is in many ways Deighton's least characteristic novel, though it's also probably his best, and it's hard to imagine anyone else writing anything quite like it. The book is a remarkable example of the way a narrative of great complexity can be constructed through the careful assembly of simple elements, and a timely reminder, nearly sixty years after it was written and more than eighty after it's set, that bombing a hospital is an atrocity whoever does it, and for whatever reason, deliberate or not.

2182 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

And not only that but … www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

My Oxford colleague Steven Balbus goes much further. The coincidence of geometry that makes the Sun and Moon roughly the same size in the sky also means that they both contribute to the tides we experience on Earth. The beating of the solar and lunar tidal cycles against each other brings the difference between more extreme spring tides and lesser neap tides. This means there are liminal places on Earth that are covered with water occasionally but dry most of the time: ideal habitats for an oft-stranded species of fish to learn to breathe air or take its first steps onto land.

0125 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Len Deighton, London Match (1985)

"Did they tell you what the agent said or did they merely tell you the content of his messagel'
'Oh, the messages were edited, but otherwise as received. They had to be; the staff handling the material didn't know enough about economics to understand what it was about.'
'But you identified different sources?' I asked yet again.
'Sometimes we could, sometimes that was easy. Some of it was total rubbish.'
From different agents?' I persisted. My God, but it was agony to deal with old people. Would I be like this one day?
'Some of their agents sent only rumours. There was one who never provided a word of good sense. They called him "Grock".

042 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

There was! That gets a mention in the article too

It's around this point that Brutus, by now in his twenties, surfaces in the historical record. In the summer of 59, a man called Lucius Vettius went to the Senate with information about a conspiracy to murder Pompey. The repentant Vettius confessed to being one of the conspirators; among the others he named was Brutus. The senators seem not to have believed him, but threw him in jail for carrying an offensive weapon. He repeated his allegations the next day, but 'removed Brutus' name from his speech entirely, Cicero says, before going on to hint that the omission may have had something to do with the fact that Brutus' mother, Servilia, was sleeping with Caesar. Their relationship led to the rumour (which can't be true) that Brutus was Caesar's illegitimate son.

021 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Italy too has foaming nimby campaigns against renewable energy infrastructure. Just imagine wind turbines ruining this landscape.

An aerial view of the decommissioned Alessandro Volta thermoelectric power station on the site of an abandoned nuclear power station in Montalto di Castro, Lazio, Italy

010 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

This was the one that most freaked me out

A giant Captain Haddock with bottles for pupils applies a corkscrew to the head of Tintin who is trapped in a bottle (a dream sequence from The Crab with the Golden Claws)

270 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

On the Italian centre-left’s anti-immigration turn, from 2018. A lesson not learned by Starmer’s Labour Party. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/ma...

The PD, in government, cracked down on immigration. With EU backing, it last year negotiated a deal with Libyan forces, supplying them with funds and equipment to keep people from crossing the Mediterranean, knowing full well what detention in Libya would mean for them.
The number of people arriving from Africa on Italy's shores dropped dramatically, from more than 180,000 in 2016 to fewer than 120,000 in 2017, and under ooo so far this year. The PD's electoral dividend from this moral capitulation was nil (at best).

045 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

What was your #childhoodcinema The ABC in Basingstoke, long since demolished: Snow White, ET, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future… I think Young Einstein might have been the last (and least good) movie I saw there.

The ABC cinema in Basingstoke with Flashdance, Airplane and Rocky III on the marquee. Photo from cinematreasures.org

120 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

This is one of the things I was trying to write about here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

LL OF THIS was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy
on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn't paying attention. Italy's last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the opening race of the Grand Prix season at Tigullio. The socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist death squad on 10 June 1924, nine days after Ferrari won the Circuito del Polesine in an Alfa Romeo RL SS. Antonio Gramsci was arrested on 9 November 1926.
'Enzo Ferrari spent 1926 in Modena,' Dal Monte writes. 'He was seen at football matches, cycling events and, in the winter months, even at ski events on the slopes of the Apennines.' What else was he supposed to do?

150 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

From a review of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

And then there's always a darker question lurking behind the one about whether or not robots can be people, and it isn't about robots but about people, and what it means when they - when we - treat others as if they weren't human. It is, or should be, troubling to realise that we have little difficulty not only in anthropomorphising computers, cars, toys or fictional characters, but also in dehumanising the people whose lives, sometimes but not always remote from our own, are instrumental to our happiness, or to our comfort.

061 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Turns out Batman’s been around at least since Roman times

192 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

Something I wrote in 2018. The UK Labour Party could learn a lesson here but won’t. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/ma...

063 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

‘the terrifying spectacle of power without a mind’ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...

Donald Trump cosplaying Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now:
‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning... Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR’

050 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

It was generous of whoever parked their Ferrari outside a bookshop in Parma to provide this bit of free publicity for the @lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...

A black Ferrari (an F12, I think?) outside a bookshop in Parma with the campanile of the cathedral in the background lit by late evening light

110 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

wrt the Dade-Collier concentration camp, something I wrote in 2007 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...

London Review
OF BOOKS
And yet, however successfully it generates unease in the complacent reader, and for all its efficiency as a thriller, full of exciting chases, double-crosses, torture, escape and recapture, Fatherland is based on a flawed - and, despite the dystopian setting, unduly optimistic - premise: that the disclosure of the Final Solution by a worn-out cop and rookie journalist could threaten to destabilise a victorious world power and scupper the possibility of rapprochement between Germany and the United States.
In the world Harris has created, the exposure of the Holocaust might provide a handy reason to back away from détente were America looking for such an excuse, but otherwise it would surely be tactfully ignored: governments, after all, have a knack for overlooking all kinds of human rights abuse, unless a cause for moral outrage happens to coincide with the national interest or the perpetrators have already been defeated and stripped of power.

020 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Not the main thing here but still good to see Nadine Shah paraphrasing Lord Hoffmann at Glastonbury www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/ju...

A screenshot of two BlueSky posts, one quoting the message from Artists for Palestine UK that Nadine Shah read out at Glastonbury, the other quoting a piece that Daniella Lock wrote a few days earlier for the LRB blog. The first says: ‘The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw the proscription of Palestine Action.’ The second says: ‘On the current picture, the real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s attempt to proscribe it.’

010 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

I took the food test in Italian and what is this abomination?

110 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

What this government will find money for and what it won’t.

Headlines from the Guardian
UK to expand nuclear deterrent with US fighter jets capable of carrying warheads
30m ago
Keir Starmer says government will stand firm on disability welfare overhaul
38m ago

043 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

‘exactly the sort of thing a foreign power tries to do to paralyse military activity’ speculates the Air Marshal, as if ‘foreign powers’ weren’t literally dropping kiloton bombs on each other as he speaks

From the Times
Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, the UK's first director of joint warfare and now a fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, last week speculated that Russia or Iran influenced the attack at RAF Brize Norton.
"It is certainly the sort of activity carried out by foreign agents and they could have influenced the activists," he said. "They (Russian or Iran] were either behind this or rubbing their hands with glee," he said. "This is exactly the sort of thing a foreign power tries to do to paralyse military activity."

020 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

I dunno, seems pretty definitive

A map painted in Italy in 1573-74 showing the Gulf of Mexico labelled Golfo Mexicano

000 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

The fun seems to have stopped some time before 2022

Glasman is enjoying a more
relaxed role in public life these days.
Amicably separated from Catherine, he now lives in a small flat in Dalston.

000 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Also includes this about the late pope. Francis wasn’t all he’s cracked up to be in many ways (see LRB passim), but he was one of the few world leaders willing to insist – right to the end – on the humanity of people who cross borders undocumented.

On 8 July 2013, the newly elected Pope Francis, on his first official trip outside Rome, arrived by boat at the island of Lampedusa to commemorate the thousands of migrants who have died crossing from North Africa. After casting a wreath into the water, he celebrated mass on the sports field that doubles as a migrant reception centre. He delivered his homily from an altar constructed out of an old fishing boat. ‘Where is your brother?’ he asked.

1519 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

My name is too generic and I stopped scrolling before I got to to me (if I’m even in there) but there’s some great sounding stuff I wish I’d written and it’s outrageous that Meta stole it from the other Thomas Joneses www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

010 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Reminds of something I wrote years ago about Pynchon www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

130 0

Thomas Jones @moonjets.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/oc...

Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern.

030 0