Joe Williams
@lifeisnotanovel
writer & critic @TheLondonMag @UnHerd @BoundlessLit @Lit_Review @theTLS @spectator @tribunemagazine / reviews editor @CritQuarterly / visiting fellow @uealdc
My review-essay on Geoff Dyer’s Homework from the June/July issue of @TheLondonMag is now online, with reference to Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, Keats, Thelonious Monk, Where Eagles Dare, etc. Some are calling it ‘subtly authoritative’. Read it here: thelondonmagazine.org/article/review…
Just sat down to book a ticket to the @SoaneMuseum’s event with @the_stone_club, and I was pleased to see they’re charging a robust £25 per person (with generous single glass of white wine or Prosecco). Fingers crossed that prices out the poor, the unsalaried, the unrelated
Empty words cannot hide the truth: your government is complicit in genocide. We are an unstoppable movement for peace, for justice and for Palestine — and we are never, ever going away.
The suffering and starvation unfolding in Gaza is unspeakable and indefensible.
Gaza faces mass starvation with supplies 'totally depleted', aid agencies warn Read more trib.al/IJywxPa
Drink up your Lost Lager – it’s last orders. @jimmy__mcintosh: Brewdog Britain is dead newstatesman.com/culture/life/2…
"We've got to the state where a man is arrested for carrying a joke." Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on the arrest of a man under the Terrorism Act for holding up a cartoon from the magazine during a protest against the ban of the group Palestine Action at the weekend. #BBCPM
This is one of those images you instantly know will appear in history books of the future. And people will wonder how we allowed this to happen.
A 2015 press cutting on Larkin’s rejection of nomination for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. ‘My idea of hell on earth…is a literary party, and I have an uneasy feeling that the post carries with it a lot of sherry-drill with important people.’
Our powerful @Daily_Express front page for tomorrow. The brutal suffering in Gaza must end. The shocking image shows Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, one, who weighs the same as three-month old baby due to the humanitarian crisis following the continued blocking of basic aid…
🚨 RIGHT NOW opposite Labour Party HQ in London. We’ve turned their street into Jabaliya camp in Gaza. A genocide is happening, but the Labour government is supplying weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover to the perpetrator. Protesting this is not terrorism.
The E.U. aren’t just complicit in this barbarism, they are directly participating in Genocide.
A Palestinian child — unable to sleep due to hunger — approaches her father, holding a plate, as the Israel-imposed food shortage and blockade persist in Gaza
Kit Malthouse to Lammy "can he not see his inaction & cowardice is making this country irrelevant? Can he also not see the personal risk to him, given our intl obligations, that he may end up at the Hague because of his inaction?" Lammy tells Malthouse his language is unbecoming
Empty words from the Foreign Secretary - the statement lacks any resolve, leadership or action to help end the genocide in Gaza. 1/4🧵
The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. Alongside 25 other partners, the UK message is clear: the war in Gaza must end now. We need an immediate ceasefire, release of all hostages and a full resumption of aid. gov.uk/government/new…
You can (and should) read de Waal's piece from May on starvation in Gaza at the @LRB: lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/may/…
"There is no case since WW2 of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled" Famine expert Alex de Waal on Israel deliberately starving an entire civilian population
Insane how desensitised we’re becoming to these daily headlines and how it’s just accepted now. Horrendous.
BREAKING: More than 30 people have been killed after Israeli troops opened fire towards crowds of Palestinians waiting for aid, according to witnesses and hospital officials news.sky.com/story/gaza-mor…
Worth bearing in mind whenever some managerial dullard makes you sit through a ppt about ‘collaborating’ with AI. There’s more intellectual weight in the motes of dust floating between you and the AI-generated image of a robot sat smiling at his robo-desk than there is in that
Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
Pope Leo calls for an end to 'barbarity' in Gaza.
Suhail is a young Catholic student from Gaza, seriously wounded in the Israeli attack on the Holy Family parish on Thursday. He writes a column for L’Osservatore Romano, the Holy See’s newspaper. Although Suhail sustained shrapnel wounds to his internal organs during…
Style is moral!
Wonderful. Some aesthetically over sensitive government censors in eighteenth century France got carried away and started trying to object to books on literary as well as political grounds
BREAKING: More than 30 people have been killed after Israeli troops opened fire towards crowds of Palestinians waiting for aid, according to witnesses and hospital officials news.sky.com/story/gaza-mor…