Posts of the Year, 2024
25 piece of writing covering teaching, books, education, architecture, technology, history, Shakespeare and more.
An interim edition to give you some end of year reading: some things I wrote during the last 12 months.
The Fortnightly itself will be back in two weeks.
Libraries: a personal history
(January)
On the most significant libraries in my life, and a tribute to the Irish public library system.
Read.
Teaching Gerard Manley Hopkins,
(February)
whose poems I’ve been reading, and then teaching, for decades.
Read.
George Saunders & Claire Keegan
(March)
I’ve been using A Swim in a Pond in the Rain all year to think about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and as I said in a couple of webinars this year, I’d make Saunders’s analysis of Russian short stories compulsory reading in an English student-teacher course.
Read.
Elizabeth Bishop
(March)
Bishop continues to be for me one of the defining poets of the twentieth (and our own) century, her attentiveness being just what we need now. Jonathan F.S. Post’s book in the ‘Very Short Introductions’ series is really good.
Read.
Reading Lessons
(April)
by Carol Atherton was a joy to read, appropriately. An account of what it is like to teach many great books over decades, it was just up my street.
Read.
AI and the thermostatic principle
(May)
A kind of commonplace post, gathering valuable insights on English teaching and AI’s implications. More coming in early 2025 on all this. The phrase ‘thermostatic principle’ comes from Neil Postman, whose understanding of the impact of technology seems more and more prescient.
Read.
On the most important school subject
(May)
which is, of course, poetry. A slightly tongue-in-cheek piece, but really completely serious.
Read.
Turn Every Page,
(May)
Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary on her father Bob, and the ‘other Bob’, the wonderful Robert Caro, is glorious.
Read.
James Shapiro
(June)
came to the Dalkey Book Festival and talked to Fintan O’Toole about Shakespeare and America.
Read.
12 short stories
(June)
for reading aloud the classroom, for Jonathan Gibbs’s A Personal Anthology. A lot of pleasure in revisiting these.
Read.
Missing Persons
(June)
by Clair Wills is subtitled ‘My Grandmother’s Secrets’. This short personal history was a reading highlight of the year.
Read.
On teaching the perfect English class
(June)
Happy memories.
Read.
Judi Dench on Shakespeare
(August)
Dench is funny, sharp and deeply knowledgeable about Shakespeare, with decades of experience spent inside these plays.
Read.
On re-reading Middlemarch
(August)
after many years. A slow read over the summer. What a novel.
Read.
Alphabetical Diaries
(June)
by Sheila Heti was one of my Books of the Year. An extraordinary form, and a book which is truly thought-provoking about the shapes our lives may take.
Read.
King Lear scene by scene
(October)
is the podcast series I completed in December, with transcripts. Here’s the first episode, on that first extraordinary scene.
Read.
The Masterbuilder
(October)
Is Nicholas Olsberg’s magisterial illustrated biography of the Victorian architect William Butterfield, one of whose buildings I know extremely well.
Read.
Small Things Like These: the film
(November)
I reviewed this with particular attention to the relationship with the original book by Claire Keegan.
Read.
The Leaving Cert and AI
(November)
I wrote for the Irish Times on “a super-charged technology & academic integrity”. More to come in the early months of 2025.
Read.
What can English teachers do?
(November)
The most-read blog post of the year, written in the context of Trump, Gaza, Ukraine and more.
Read.
Morant by Roy Goddard
(November)
is odd, compelling, unpredictable: a real Marmite novel.
Read.
VAR and the Leaving Certificate
(December)
Daisy Christodoulou is one of the most consistently precise thinkers about education around, and I used the opportunity of the publication of her entertaining book about football’s Video Assistant Referee system to write about Leaving Certificate reform.
Read.
Contingencies and decisions in Small Things Like These
(December)
Questions of chance, decisions and the directions life can take were on my mind when I wrote this, focussing on Bill Furlong in Claire Keegan’s novel, and also bringing in Richard Flanagan’s extraordinary memoir Question 7, Brian Klaas, Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne.
Read.
My Books of the Year, 2024
(December)
The pre- Christmas Fortnightly, now in blogpost form.
Read.
Andrew Bennett and Small Things
(December)
On Bennett’s staged reading of the whole of Small Things Like These. A marvellous evening.
Read.
