Michael Neill

Michael Neill , emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland, is about to turn eighty.

Diary: A Place of ‘Kotahitanga’

Michael Neill, 6 October 2022

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...

Letter

Bloody Pommy

10 February 2022

Thomas Nagel quotes Philippa Foot on being asked how to detect a ‘lower-class accent’: ‘My dear, any British accent is lower class’ (LRB, 10 February). There is a striking consonance with the construction of ‘colour’ explored by Musab Younis in his piece in the same issue. To speak in something like BBC English or Received Pronunciation was to be accent-less, just as to have ‘white’...
Letter

Bloody Pommy

10 February 2022

Thomas Nagel quotes Philippa Foot on being asked how to detect a ‘lower-class accent’: ‘My dear, any British accent is lower class’ (LRB, 10 February). There is a striking consonance with the construction of ‘colour’ explored by Musab Younis in his piece in the same issue. To speak in something like BBC English or Received Pronunciation was to be accent-less, just as to have ‘white’...
Letter
Katherine Rundell discusses the ancient reputation of hares as witches or fairy-folk (LRB, 2 July). The notion of hares as witches has a particularly tenacious history in Ireland. Medieval commentators such as Caxton recorded the belief that Irish ‘beldams’ could ‘transform themselves into the likenesses of hares, in order to milk their neighbours’ cattle and steal their milk’. As recently...

In the Shady Wood: Staging the Forest

Michael Neill, 22 March 2018

Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s...

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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