Michael Neill

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

Letter

Like Talking Underwater

22 May 2025

I wasn’t surprised to read, in David Thomson’s piece, about Terrence Malick’s uncomfortable experience as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1965 (LRB, 22 May). ‘Talking to the Brits,’ he said, ‘was like talking underwater.’ I arrived in Cambridge the same year, at a time when many New Zealanders still spoke of the United Kingdom as ‘home’. I was quickly disabused of this fantasy during...
Letter

Get Out Now

8 June 2024

In the light of Adam Shatz’s superb piece on Israel and the US it is depressing to reflect on the extent to which propagandists for Israel have succeeded in defining any attack on its government’s policies as antisemitic (LRB, 20 June). Two decades ago I was shocked when the New Zealand Herald fired its longstanding cartoonist Malcolm Evans for a work that dared to compare Israel’s oppression...

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’...

Pieces about Michael Neill in the LRB

On the Way in which Tragedy ‘Openeth up the Greatest Wounds and Showeth forth the Ulcers that are Covered with Tissue’

Terence Hawkes, 11 December 1997

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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