It’s (just over) half way through the year, so it’s a good chance to take stock of what I’ve been reading and what the highlights have been (let’s pass over the books that haven’t appealed so much. Everyone who knows me knows that I read quite a few books each…

I’ve long been a fan of Wikipedia, which is almost certainly ‘the last best place on the Internet.’ I’m also a big believer in giving students more authentic writing tasks than the deathly boring ‘text response essay’ that they are usually asked to write in English. I therefore thought it…

There is a legend that has grown around this play that Queen Elizabeth was so taken with the character of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One (and possibly Part Two, although the chronology I’m following has this play coming before Part Two) that she commanded Shakespeare to write a new…

The law of life is movement. The circumscribed dies. Exodus is as necessary anywhere there is life, as ingress. We were the only British colony of our kind in the world. There was no other similar place with which we could have reciprocity or exchange. So, when the human cry…

Apparently, for astronauts re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere in a Soyuz space capsule after a stay on the International Space Station, the experience is a very bumpy ride, like a series of car crashes: For those of us who have experienced living through Covid-induced lockdowns it can feel like you’re…

Okay, let’s get the bold claim out there: this is Shakespeare’s most perfectly constructed play. Is it his best play? …

For a number of years I’ve asked my students to write poems inspired by artworks. My initial incursions in this area came from my participation in a program that was administered by the National Gallery of Victoria in partnership with the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, with the participation of…

I’d like to say a few words about the penis. I realise that it may not seem like the most polite way to start an article (or a conversation), but you have to admit that they are a fairly common anatomical feature, with approximately fifty percent of the population possessing…

Each year as part of the World Literature elective I teach at my high school I run a ‘World Cup of Literature’: a tournament format that gets students to read stories from a range of different countries around the world and decide on a ‘winner’. I find that it’s a…