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My latest Instagram photographs

Landscapes, libraries, travels and home. A little bit of everything from my Instagram feed.

petermoore__

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A few years ago I wrote about James Glaisher’s ambitious 1860s balloon ascents in The Weather Experiment. Here’s a contemporary photograph of Glaisher I bought while busy with research. It was taken as he was enjoying his first flush of fame as the man who had soared higher than anyone else in history (which was about seven miles in a good thick coat).
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Glaisher’s ballooning has always been a rather obscure bit of Victoriana, but a year or so ago I heard that his story had been picked up by Hollywood. And here it is! Glaisher - played by Eddie Redmayne - is the hero of the new film “The Aeronauts”, which opens on Monday. I’m intrigued to see it.
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Here’s a few Aeronautical pics 🎈 🌧 ☀️ #theaeronauts #glaisher #ballooning #science #theweatherexperiment

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I’ve seen lots of sun, sandcastles and cirrus clouds on/over the Isle of Wight this beautiful week. #isleofwight #family #holidays #beaches #theneedles

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A box of Endeavour paperbacks has arrived. No kangaroo on the front this time but the design wizards at @vintagebooks have made it look just as bright and brilliant as the hardback. Out on 6 June! 🦘

#endeavour #bookstagram #history #enlightenment #bookdesign #ships

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Holidays at long long last. Hello from Venice Beach, CA. #outofoffice #californication

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I’ve six hours of teaching tomorrow on memory and imagination in non-fiction writing. Here are six books that are going to get me through it. #bookstagram #nonfictionbooks @aanch_m

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Mike Jay’s one of my favourite writers and this is his completely original and totally absorbing new history of mescaline. I was lucky enough to read it in manuscript last year and it’s out next month in this suitably trippy cover. .
“As darkness fell, honeycombs of green and violet threaded across my vision ... I thought of the thousands of cacti we had seen stretching and sprawling across the slopes of the mountain valleys as they luxuriated in the sun, each one a mescaline factory.” 🌵 🌵 🌵 #bookstagram #nonfictionbooks #yaleuniversitypress #psychedelic

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I love the way he puts on his coat. #toddlersofinstagram #style

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A few Oxford scenes from this morning. There’s the colourful houses on Oriel Street and the yard outside Pembroke College. I also liked the carved face over the Pembroke entrance gate. I guess those stoney eyes must have watched my old hero Samuel Johnson striding in and out a few hundred years ago.
#oxford #orielstreet #architecture #oxforduniversity #samueljohnson

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London. On board camera. 📷 💼 🚊 #london #tube #mindthegap

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It’s just about my favourite time of the year when the graceful magnolia tree in Margravine Cemetery comes into bloom.
#london #trees #magnolia #margravinecemetery #parks #spring

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“Could the story of the Polynesian voyagers be written in full, then it would be the wonder of the world.” Really lovely mix of history, adventure and science in Sea People by Christina Thompson. I’ve just reviewed it for next month’s @lit_review
#nonfictionbooks #literature #books #polynesian #pacific #bookstagram #voyaging

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Two and a half months after Christmas and I came across this little tree in a nearby street. I didn’t know whether to admire it as the lone survivor of a vanquished population or feel pity for it as tree out of time. #tree #london #survivors

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Time’s flying. Two tomorrow! ✈️ #toddlersofinstagram #madmarchhare #birthday

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In Greenwich and entranced as ever by the masts and yards of the Cutty Sark. About to give an Endeavour lecture at the Maritime Museum.

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Disfrutando esta novela grafica sobre FG Lorca casi tanto como mi pan dulce de caramelo en Caffé Nero. #sabados #librosenespañol #librosrecomendados #federicogarcialorca

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This is the botanist-explorer George Forrest who brought all sorts of rhododendrons and other plants - some reckon 30,000 in all - to Europe from Yunnan, China, in the early 1900s. I love the little flower pressed into his hat.

For our latest History Today podcast I travelled up to Hertfordshire to chat with Matt Biggs (of @bbcgqt) about plant hunting and one of Forrest’s narrow scrapes.
#history #plants #bbcgqt #exploration #china

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Happy to see these first stirrings of spring #london #spring #flowers #nofilter

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Happy 210th birthday to Charles Darwin. On Sunday I gave the Charles Darwin Memorial Lecture in Shrewsbury on his voyaging companion (second pic) Robert FitzRoy who captained HMS Beagle on the famous circumnavigation. I think theirs was one of the most complicated and consequential friendships of the c19th and FitzRoy one of its most striking characters. He later founded the Met Office and established the daily weather forecast. He committed suicide in 1865.

Here is how the young Darwin described FitzRoy in a letter home while on his travels: “As far as I can judge, [FitzRoy] is a very extraordinary person. I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson. I should not call him clever, yet I feel convinced nothing is too great or too high for him. His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious; the extent to which every officer and man feels the slightest pride or rebuke would have been before seeing him incomprehensible. His candour and sincerity are to me unparalleled; and using his own words his “vanity and petulance” are nearly so ... His great fault as a companion is his austere silence brought on from excessive thinking. His many great qualities are numerous: altogether he is the strongest marked character I ever fell in with.” #darwin #history #onthisdayinhistory #fitzroy #beagle #weather #19thcentury

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Reading Armand d’Angour’s new biography of Socrates and having my image of him as a white-bearded man in sandals and a toga thoroughly obliterated.
There’s a nice picture of him as a soldier in the Athenian army, going into battle ‘with swaggering gait and roving eye’. We’re recording a time travel with Armand to meet the man himself tomorrow.
#philosophy #greece #socrates #bookstagram

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A few additions this weekend to my ongoing series: “The strange and unexplained histories of discarded items of clothing in London” 1) A nice woolly hat left on the statue of Capability Brown at Fulham Reach & 2) A pair of black leather gloves on the railings outside Chatham House in St James Square. #london #streetart #lost #lostandfound #mystery

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