Dr Fiona Tolan

Social media can certainly make me feel bleak right now ☹️ - I find limiting time on here helps

Tuxedo cat sat atop a fish tank against a white background and under a red sign that reads ‘BASTA!’

My cat suggests everyone just BASTA 🐈‍⬛

Great choices! 📚

Tuxedo cat lying on top of a fish tank

Her favourite nap spot 🐠

She was born in Northumberland and now has a College named after her at Durham University

Yeah, it makes me laugh how annoyingly random it is 😂

Nice article. The 6-7 frenzy is younger than teenagers though - the tweens should get their glory!

Just back from a winter solstice swim - a fast 1.5k in the Thames - perfect chilly Christmas start ❄️

One of our reviews editors @heyitsdenisew.bsky.social has a book out! Congratulations Denise!

Looks fab - congratulations!

Orange and pink cover for Like a Cat Loves a Bird, a forthcoming biography of Muriel Spark, with a black and white photo of Spark holding a black cat on the cover

Here’s the cover for LIKE A CAT LOVES A BIRD: THE NINE LIVES OF MURIEL SPARK, out 16 April with @sceptrebooks.bsky.social

Preorder here: lnk.to/LikeaCatLove...

Please share! The book doing well means I can write another (and fulfil my dream of owning a pizza oven), so it’s pretty serious

🐈‍⬛ 🐈‍⬛ 🐈‍⬛

Aerial shot of a winding River Thames banked by green fields

This is the route I swam this morning (though under rainier skies) - a beautiful spot

Don’t fall for the authoritarian hype – Reform and the hard right can be stopped in their tracks | Gordon Brown From the US to Europe and Asia, grievances are being exploited to gain power. But moderate voices are still in tune with the majority, says former prime minister Gordon Brown

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

An implacable brown and tan rabbit guards a door.

None shall pass.

Tuxedo cat stretched out across top step of brightly carpeted stairs

You shall not pass!

Shot of inside of the Sheldonian theatre, university of Oxford, with crowd starting to fill the seats

In the beautiful but uncomfortable Sheldonian Theatre waiting for Ian McEwan to arrive 📚 #oxford #books

Stonehenge and grey clouds overhead

Always funny driving along the A303 and getting a great view of Stonehenge and the tourists

Back home but thinking about 7pm at the beach when the sun goes down (sound up for waves) ⛱️

Just asked my 9 yr old and she didn’t know

View through a stone doorway over a hillside of Italian trulli - traditional houses with distinctive conical grey stone roofs

My current view over the trulli in Alberobello 🇮🇹

Please help me share the CFP for this Literature Compass Special Issue dedicated to the work of Simon J James and covering key Victorian and Edwardian writers like H. G. Wells, George Gissing, Dickens, Wilde, George Du Maurier, and Conan-Doyle on behalf of Hadas Elber-Aviram.

It’s always “Ladies, if you are alienated by overwork, drop out of the public sphere and become a tradwife” and never “Ladies, if you are alienated by overwork, form a union.”

Quadrangle of the Bodleian library with sunshine and shadows on the library walls

Waiting on the library to open & trying to figure out which wing will be shadiest over the course of the day 🥵

Fox walking along a wall with a black cat peering down at it from a fence

My cat outraged at the cheeky fox in our garden in broad daylight 🐈‍⬛ 🦊

Close up of a fox looking directly at the camera

Excuse me, is that breakfast pancakes I can smell?

‘I get up at 4 a.m. when I wake, & it is black, & write till the babes wake. It is like writing in a train tunnel, or God’s intestine.’

Sylvia Plath on writing Ariel, in a letter to Richard Murphy in October 1962. At this time, Plath was sometimes writing two poems a morning.

This Is How You Lose the Sex Wars Trying to pick a pathway through forty years of the ugliest conflict in feminism.

This essay by @judedoyle.bsky.social on sex, porn, and the sex wars is just fantastic. I endorse every word of it.

Predictions of £40bn hit to public finances from Brexit ‘correct’ Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of a 4 per cent productivity loss from leaving the EU has been largely borne out, says top economist

Predictions of £40bn hit to public finances from Brexit ‘correct’

Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of a 4 per cent productivity loss from leaving the EU has been largely borne out, says top economist

www.thetimes.com/business-mon...

Collage of 2 photos: on the left, a green leather bound copy of GH; on the right, colour cover of first issue - a drawing of a little girl pouring milk into a saucer for a kitten

So geekily excited to finally have my hands on the first issue of Good Housekeeping from 1922

I can’t stop thinking about what it must be like to be Pitbull in the O2 arena, looking out at 1000s of people all dressed up as *you* 🔥