William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 14/10/2026I haven't read it but calling an African miner "your Virgil" is extremely misguided in any imaginable context. 110
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 13/10/2026Glassware in historical dramas is often very wrong. Balloon wine glasses, brandy snifters, martini glasses, champagne flutes etc. 0243
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 12/10/2026Are men reading enough fiction? Are women eating enough Branston Pickle? Are Dutch accounts losing interest in motorsports? Do maths teachers buy enough bottled water? How can we encourage jockeys to knit? What will it take to lure left handed people back to the theatre? 071
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 02/10/2026"English is an ethnicity, British is a nationality" sort of sounds like it might make sense at first, but it actually doesn't, so just go and buy some crisps and let the conversation drift onto something else. 040
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 02/10/2026The whole vibe of this argument is like one of those nights at the pub where you say something off the cuff then an hour later you are frantically googling stuff rather than admit you were wrong. 120
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 24/09/2026More nonsense from me in The Fence, as well as new fiction by William Boyd if you are interested in that sort of thing 022
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 24/09/2026That's true, but also the DRC royalty rate is well below that of Zambia. The DRC supertax may counteract that a bit, but as you say, there are many ways to avoid tax 110
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Kipling invokes this a lot in the Puck of Pook's Hill books. It's a vision of history in which Romans, Danes, Normans are repeatedly engraffed to English rootstock. Certainly racism, but of a very different sort to the German or American versions of the same period. 000
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Reading between the lines (or loins) they're going to be using David Crystal's OP, which would be very cool if true 100
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026And as to how it alienates employees: it forces their attention away from work that they have ownership over, towards work that primarily helps managers in other parts of the company, with unclear results and no reliable impact on their salary/bonus 020
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026To be clear, this is a vibe based assessment, but you can look at the emergence of "silos" as a management theory bugbear post financial crisis. 100
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Hot desking is terrible, but it's only a symptom of a larger managerial push for collaboration across, rather than within, teams, which alienates workers from their own labour. "Breaking down silos" swaps inter-department friction for interpersonal friction, making offices lonelier 100
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Best case scenario tbqh. The most interesting things in Lewis' work are his horniness and his neoplatonism, and this might at least capture the first 000
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Found a slug hidden in the garnish. Determined not to make a scene, I put it on the side of my plate. Unfortunately the plate was extremely hot, and the slug proceeded to cook, releasing a thin dribble of slug gravy. I had to build a retaining dam out of pommes puree to protect my roast duck 041
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Fundamentally if someone gets a 2k pay rise, and is told that is a reward for working hard, and 1.5k of that goes to covering increased costs, they are going to be furious. If they get a 1.5k cost of living rise, and 0.5k salary increase, they'll feel a lot better 041
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 17/09/2026You can compare this with Britain in the same period where salaries were controlled much more aggressively, and inflation became the overwhelming electoral issue 130
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 17/09/2026In the 1970s far more salaries had escalator clauses. There was much more psychological differentiation between cost of living increases and real-terms salary increases. Now people see their worked-for salary wages being eaten by price increase. It's a totally different mentality. 140
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Basically all micronations postdate passport to Pimlico. There's a good case that the entire phenomenon is the result of one financially unsuccessful film. 020
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 04/09/2026The Chandos is a very apposite choice. It's not good and nobody really likes it, but it also could be a lot worse given the circumstances. 011
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 28/08/2026If I can understand it it's trivial, if I can't understand it it's nonsense 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 27/08/2026I say this without judgement, but it's amazing how different the time scales involved are. I used to single-handedly get a monthly magazine out the door with about three days work, but books seem to require multiple years. 120
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Is that plausible? I'm not in academia, but that seems a very high bar in a UK university. 210
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 10/08/2026All Europe contributed to the making of Dobby 041
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 06/08/2026I suspect that if you really pulled apart the chain of causality here, this is less about "wokeness" than it is about universities employing far too many press officers with not enough to do. 021
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Not to mention Tanganyika, the Cape Colony and depending on how you define it, the Congo Free State 110
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 27/07/2026Whatever your opinion of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, please remember what's really important: making sure everyone knows you have read the original 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 25/07/2026My fundamental issue is that a jeweled egg shouldn't be big. It should be egg sized. Making it big renders the entire project incoherent. 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 24/07/2026Higher sectional density, but lower dynamic lift. I would choose the baguette against an armoured target 120
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 24/07/2026It's no really that they are too short, it's that the waist is sitting too low and so they aren't hanging well. Probably because he's put on weight since they were made. 000
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 16/07/2026I'm only vaguely remembering this, but wasn't the eventual conclusion on the Hindenburg that it was the skin that ignited first, and it would have burned and crashed even if it were filled with an inert gas? 220
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 10/07/2026The problem, I think, is not that the journalism jobs aren't out there, it's that they aren't visible to new starters. With a handful of honourable exceptions, I wouldn't advise a young journo to go anywhere near local news, for example. 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 08/07/2026"Is that the.." "The Erdogan revolver? Yes, it is." 030
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 30/06/2026I used to see these things around Bermondsey, and I would fantasize about trapping one by covering a pit with leaves, cracking it open with primitive stone tools, and feasting on the curry in its guts 000
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 25/06/2026I remember there was one day when me and my pals were feeling a bit too warm, but fortunately just at that moment a five bob postal order from "Fatty" Fozwick's great aunt arrived, and we blued it on a crate of ginger beer. 060
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 07/06/2026*Sniffs top of shower gel bottle* "Oh yeah. That's really good sauce" 000
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 04/06/2026I think the only fair exchange is that we let the Greeks make a movie about the Founding Fathers, filmed in Greece with an all Greek cast, and also George Washington wears doublet and hose, and drives a steam train around, and the British Army all wear pith helmets. 110
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 31/05/2026Hard to say, but compare France with higher debt, a higher deficit, and a much larger public sector than the UK, yet considerably lower cost of borrowing. It's not at all clear that slashing spending, at the cost of infrastructure and growth, would reduce our cost of borrowing. 152
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 31/05/2026I think the quote here: "the bond markets are not ideological, they just want to know there is a plan" is a pretty mainstream view. It's the idea behind Reeve's PSNFL, for example. It's also why increasing the basic rate was expected to add much fiscal headroom. 240
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 22/05/2026It's wreaking havok on our supply of character actors, and I will not be silent 0251
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 21/05/2026A state of the nation tale: a publisher won't accept my slim volume of verse about parsnips 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 16/05/2026It's striking how much more fun this list is than the guardian one. Romance, horror, adventure. 010
Reposted by William ClarkeSal Cap0ne @salimotxo.bsky.social · 15/05/2026Me doing 'how many of these 100 novels have you read' things in the papers 421044
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 14/05/2026"Vote of No Confidence? I'm more interested in Vitalizing our Neglected Communities?" - MPs, please credit me if you use this 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 14/05/2026Earlier in the passage Amis says something about how when Enoch Powell was angry his eyes slanted inwards with the pupils in the inner corner, like a child's cartoon of a malevolent person. 010
William Clarke @williamasclarke.bsky.social · 14/05/2026I wouldn't say I own a larger than normal number of bottles of alcohol, household chemicals, knives or unsecured bookcases, but when I have a child in my flat it seems to contain little else 1130
