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  • ‘The death of Swift’s printer John Harding – new evidence that implicates Swift’, Melbourne Irish Studies Seminar Series, 17 November 2020

    With an introduction by Professor Dianne Hall. Zoom presentation accessible here.

  • ”Elegy on the death of John Harding’ (April 1725) – evidence of Swift’s authorship’, presented in the XVII David Nicol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies: Dark Enlightenments, virtual conference, 13 November – 11 December 2020

    Video presentation accessible here.

  • Ode to a patch of MCG turf

    Farewell, we bid thee, piece of turf three metres by one, As thou travelleth up the Hume, the truck that transports thee, we cannot outrun.For as long as the sun has risen in the east, thou hast glistened with morning dew,Now, as thou truckest, may thou receive the care that is thy due.May thou be…

  • The revolution is being televised

    In his 1971 cult classic, ‘The Revolution will not be televised’, Gil Scott-Heron envisions the African-American uprising in a song that oozes power, rhythm and classic African-American cool. ‘You will not be able to stay home, brother,’ he sings in the call-to-arms refrain, ‘because the revolution will not be televised.’ Fifty years on, the revolution…

  • The clear sky of these football-free days

    How good is this break from football? I say that as someone who has followed the game since the age of three and who still thinks it is one of the best spectator sports in the world. But of all the incidental benefits that have stemmed from the coronavirus, is there any more valuable than…

  • High Court sport

    We are approaching a period in which four of the seven judges on the High Court will have to retire. Two reach the mandatory retirement age within the next twelve months, another in October 2022, then the Chief Justice herself in January 2024. Not since the latter half of the 1990’s has there been a…

  • MH370 – the lead that vanished

    Now that the “shocking” new evidence in the Sky News documentary MH370: The Untold Story has been revealed, I write to report a disappearance. Of the various theories and leads that have been advanced since the tragedy on 8 March 2014, there is one that has gone missing, never sighted by any investigating team including,…

  • My kingdom for a horse in Australia

    In his new book, The Brothers York: An English Tragedy, Thomas Penn patches over an important detail relating to Edward IV, who reigned from 1461 to 1483. Penn describes Edward as having been the legitimate son of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and his wife Lady Cecily Neville. However, Edward’s legitimacy was a point of…

  • School Council Diary

    My experiences on School Council 2019…

  • Sic note

    We all make mistakes. To quote the Augustan satirist Alexander Pope, “to err is humanistic”. But we also like to point out other people’s mistakes and in the written form we do this with ‘sic’, the term inserted into a sentence (in parentheses) to make it clear that the mistake is not ours. It is…