@alanlester
British Empire Professor, University of Sussex. Co-editor, MUP Studies in Imperialism series. Views here own. Blogs on politics of colonial history here: https://alanlester.co.uk Editor https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-truth-about-empire/
Future historians are going to need a lot of help from pyschoanalysts to understand Trump's awestruck paralysis whenever he comes into Putin's orbit. Either that or access to Russian intelligence files.
www.reuters.com/world/kremli...
2/2 … and among white people terrified or brutalised by national service. One friend, a gay conscientious objector, was imprisoned and regularly assaulted, while two teachers I befriended turned against me as I reacted with horror at their “trophy” photos of dead Angolan soldiers.
1/2 Great piece on the trauma that maintaining white supremacy brings, including to its ‘beneficiaries’. I witnessed that in apartheid South Africa in 1988, when I spent time in black communities plagued by detentions without trial and ‘disappearances’, …
www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...
Good analysis of ever greater divergence between Netanyahu’s & Trump’s will for destruction & chaos in Iran as economic turmoil sets in.
www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...
Both Reform's and the Conservatives' foreign policy now amounts to rendering Britain a toy that Trump can periodically throw out of his cot when piqued and demand back again, so he can repeat the same antic whenever he feels like it.
www.independent.co.uk/voices/edito...
Brilliant from @nesrinemalik.bsky.social: how Trump & Netanyahu have just jeopardised the entire Gulf State apparatus.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
White House X post showing Trump as Superman
If any novelist had their fictional US President post images of himself in Superman guise to the nation, they’d be derided, quite rightly, for mocking their readers’ credulity.
1/2 An opportunity to consider the UK’s reparative role in mobilising the Commonwealth as a global community acting on climate change:
Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism share.google/alAYdCFCEOjC...
Second “explainer” piece here www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
This FOl enquiry for the Guardian has taken up a great deal of my life for the past 2 years. (1/3)
2/2 A Carradice or Karimore canvas saddlebag attached to a Brooks leather saddle.
1/2 My vote for English cultural artefacts from my cycle touring youth …
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Yes, may have hit carried away there 😊
3/3 And meanwhile, a new superpower, one that enacts its own internal atrocities & oppressions, but never did colonise the wider world or carry out the Holocaust or trans-Atlantic slavery, sits and watches as the USA hastens the West’s decline by indulging Trump’s every narcissistic, ignorant urge.
2/3 A few billionaires, irrevocably invested in the climate crisis, hoard more wealth than many countries and use it to buy up media so they can persuade the people to direct their ire at the world’s poorest and most vulnerable- those who have left the one home they have for fear or poverty.
1/3 There is and End of Days feel about Western Hegemony right now. A half millennia in which the West hoarded much of the world’s wealth, plundering, colonising and burning through fossil fuels, is ending in a paroxysmal, Trumpian blunder.
www.thetimes.com/culture/book...
This is also worth a read on Paul Marshall’s right wing ecosytem which exists to back a populist right wing takeover of the UK, whether it’s in Conservative or Reform clothing app.thenewworld.co.uk/story/143582...
What disgusting hypocrisy. @thespectator1828.bsky.social publishes malicious falsehoods to suggest my university and I personally indoctrinate students while its owner funds fellowships specifically to embed right wing indoctrination.
alanlester.co.uk/blog/smearin...
Interesting book launch, 26 March in London:
www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...
Three men standing in a field with their sheepdogs alongside
Looking forward to giving a talk at the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, drawing on @alanlester.bsky.social's ideas of imperial careers, to trace the evolving lives of shepherds and sheepdogs in the UK and New Zealand.
Thanks to Karen Sayer for the invitation
Picture from the Otago Witness
Statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square
2/2 Such clear-eyed assessments of Churchill are much needed when far right political interests are so invested in controlling his legacy:
alanlester.co.uk/blog/winston...
1/2 With Trump invoking Churchill to belittle Starmer, this, from Churchill expert
@RichardToye
, is worth reading:
"Churchill once observed that war, once unleashed, rarely follows the tidy paths imagined by those who start it."
theconversation.com/what-would-w...
Excellent analysis of the conflict causing the world’s most extensive humanitarian disaster right now:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Incredibly disturbing. A cabal of radicalised, white supremacist, Christian fundamentalist MAGA ‘clerics’ has been casting around for legitimate reasons for this war on their Iranian counterparts but it boils down to the satisfaction of smiting perceived enemies.
newrepublic.com/post/207334/...
The resurgence of unashamed racism is why we need to stop teaching about the Empire’s “legacies” and focus on its continuities:
alanlester.co.uk/blog/we-need...
The death of British Conservatism plays out every day in politics & media. It has been replaced by a hysterical, illiberal, authoritarianism which has pitched its tent to the gut prejudices of Trump & MAGA true believers: which is not a very popular position with the UK public.
