Michael Neill , emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland, is about to turn eighty.
There’s a Northern Irish joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:
‘I say, what’s going on here?’
‘It’s the Twalth!’
‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’
‘Ay, the...
Hamlet calls death the ‘undiscovered country’, but perhaps the deftness of that description masks a fatal insouciance. True, it isn’t really possible for us to...
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