Ronan McDonald

Earlier this year, I took a group of students to the State Library of Victoria (SLV) to see its impressive Joyce collection. We examined some special books, including lavish editions of Ulysses: the 1935 Limited Editions Club edition, with Matisse’s accompanying etchings; the 1988 Arion Press edition, with illustrations by Robert Motherwell – and various others. But the one that had lured us ... (read more)

July 1970. A graduate student in English at Columbia University was feeling bogged down in her PhD topic. She was only a year or so in and reckoned that there was still time for her to make a switch from medieval sermons to a modern author. She wrote on index cards the names of numerous writers she liked, including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. She the ... (read more)

The left has an appalling habit of handing over its best ideas to the right. A non-exhaustive list might include: the ideal of common citizenship, anti-tribalism, belief in artistic quality, ribald humour, irony, working-class solidarity, the existence of disinterested truth. Free speech – the rallying cries of radical Berkeley students in the 1960s – is now typically a right-wing cause, deplo ... (read more)