4 Dead Londoners To Follow On Twitter

Will Noble
By Will Noble Last edited 98 months ago
4 Dead Londoners To Follow On Twitter
Jeremy Bentham is watching you. Sort of

William Shakespeare: @Wwm_Shakespeare

Southwark's Bard notched up over 1,700 words of his own in his lifetime. He's still using them, and many more, thanks to this Twitter account, which regularly spouts this kind of wisdom:

Learn one of these every day and people down the pub will soon consider you a genius.

Jeremy Bentham: @PanoptiStream

It's well known that awaiting you in the south cloister of UCL is the auto-icon of ex-philosopher Jeremy Bentham. What you may NOT know is that Jez has a Twitter and Instagram account. At one minute past the hour, a small camera above his head (well, his wax head, the real one's locked up somewhere) takes a snapshot; often all you'll see is a deserted corridor but once in a while there are gems like this:

There's also a bloke who seems to visit a lot, holding up wise quotes in front of the camera. We salute such practice.

Samuel Johnson: @DrSamuelJohnson

Samuel Pepys has an excellently curmudgeonly Twitter account that's a must-follow for Londoners, but we REALLY love this one, belonging to another bewigged great — Samuel Johnson. Why? This isn't extracts from a diary of old, but rather tweets from the Johnson as he'd write them today. To wit:

Kenneth Williams: @WilliamsDiaries

Though this sourpuss of a comedian died in Camden in 1988, he's tweeting from beyond the grave, courtesy of extracts from his famously bitter diary. Entries such as "Recorded the Hancock show. I was really very bad indeed. It was a lousy script too" are commonplace, and there are oodles of London-centric tirades:

Life-affirming stuff, basically.

As we've already covered, London also has plenty of dead cats, badgers, moles and dinosaurs tweeting away too.

Last Updated 08 January 2016

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