Politics And Language

Professor Barry Spurr was a member of the academic staff of the Department of English in the University of Sydney for 40 years and was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry. Spurr touched off a bitter debate by denouncing the modern school curriculum for English studies. Miranda Devine, commentator and columnist for The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun took up the cause when Barry Spurr was ousted from Sydney University over what were judged to be “offensive” private emails in what Spurr said were nothing more than a word game with academic friends. For Devine, Spurr was sacrificed in an increasing trend of academic puritanism against those who do not follow politically correct fashions. Miranda Devine and Barry Spurr addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 5 October 2016 – Devine to reflect on the action against Spurr at the University of Sydney; Barry Spurr to present his case against the modern attack on traditional English studies in the academic world.

POLITICS AND LANGUAGE

BARRY SPURR

As anyone with an elementary knowledge of language and literature knows, words must be read in context. Language-use cannot be interpreted, let alone evaluated, in a referential vacuum. The more you study language, the more aware you become of the all-important significance of contextual issues for the accurate and wise understanding of meaning. A professional lifetime spent reading, studying, teaching and writing about poetry – the most elusive and complex of language-usages – has made me acutely sensitive to the fact that we ignore context at our peril if we are to embark on intelligent interpretation and understanding of texts, without which any reading is ignorant and, potentially, seriously misleading.

Some common words and phrases in contemporary use demonstrate the need to determine the wider context in order to choose between alternative, even contradictory interpretations. “Enormity” is currently used to describe largeness. Until fairly recently, it was a negative term meaning a gross evil, and a few writers and speakers still use it in this way. So we have to be especially careful in the matter of contextualisation when we come upon it in such as a news report – for example: “the enormity of the Grand Final crowd”; or “the enormity of the tsunami”. Is the former a damning criticism of crowd behaviour or merely a description of size, even celebrating the large numbers in attendance at the game? Is the latter embracing both the size of the event and the horror of its consequences? The context of the articles in which the word appears will tell us. Other contemporary solecisms such as the misuse of “fortuitous” for “fortunate” and “deprecate” for “depreciate” can only be clarified by the contexts in which we find them. Without consideration of those contexts we have no way at all of knowing.

A word that has undergone significant and lamentable change of meaning in recent times is “disinterested”. It has come to replace “uninterested”. To say, “Everyone has observed that he is a particularly disinterested judge” would once have been a high compliment – meaning that his Honour’s impartiality was evident. Now, it would be a criticism, suggesting that the judge was disengaged from, indifferent to, the cases he was trying. But some writers would still use the word correctly, and context alone would reveal which meaning – and, therefore, which evaluation – was intended.

In vernacular speech, the element of humour or its absence is yet another contextual nuance we must be alert to if we are to read (or hear) and interpret correctly. A good example is the word “bastard”. In an angry interchange, it is a savage criticism; while in the jocular phrase, “You lucky bastard!”, said to someone who has won a prize, it is affectionate, with a touch of wry mock-envy.

“Gay” is the example of the necessity of contextualisation that everyone (I assume) now knows. William Wordsworth, amongst the dancing daffodils, wrote that ‘a poet could not but be gay, / in such a jocund company’. He is telling us that he is happy, not that he is a homosexual. The Gay Hussars of the eponymous operetta; A Bachelor Gay of the early twentieth-century popular song, and The Gay Divorcee of the musical film of that name from the thirties, were anything but gay in the modern sense. It wasn’t until the latter part of the twentieth century that “gay”, in general usage, took on its specific (and now dominant) connotation of sexual identity and also became a noun: as in “the only gay in the village”. The character who utters that line, repeatedly, and bemoans his condition, in the satirical series Little Britain, is anything but “gay” in the old sense of the word: the humour depends upon the recognition of that linguistic tension. This “gay” is not “gay”.

Then words have different valuations in distinct cultural groupings. “Nigga” is not derogatory in African-American rap music today, but unspeakable elsewhere. So what Christopher Hitchens calls an “epidermal subdivision” can be yet another contextual determinant of meaning and, further, of acceptability, with regard to whether a word or phrase is offensive, or not remotely offensive. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib reportedly “lashed out at ‘white people’” in August, 2015[1], accusing them of trying to bring down his government. If a white PM “lashed out” at “black people” he would be denounced as a racist and even be hounded from office.

But the “racism” accusation was not even mentioned in the reporting of Mr Najib’s attack. After Andrew Hastie’s victory in the September, 2015 by-election for the Federal seat of Canning, the Sydney Morning Herald letters editor had no qualms in publishing a contribution criticising the appointment of “another right-wing white male Christian” to Canberra – the writer managing, in the course of just one sentence, to be racist, sexist and, as if through guilt by association with Hastie’s regrettable whiteness, maleness and alleged right-wingery, to vilify the man’s religious commitment too. Were someone to write to the paper condemning the election of a left-wing black female Muslim it would be unthinkable that the letter would even be printed. Once again we must have recourse to context to understand the inclusion and the omission in such cases. The highly selective censoriousness of current political correctness would explain the editorial decision in such an instance.

The known beliefs and teachings of an individual can also be of contextual importance with regard to the assessment, in acceptance or denunciation, of what they have written. In a private letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, Marx called Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the German Social Democratic Party, a “Jewish nigger”.[2] If someone were to write that phrase today, in private correspondence similarly made public, the contemporary followers of Marx would be in the vanguard of those calling for the lynching of the racist bigot. Yet would they denounce Marx himself? Or construct an historical, “pre-Holocaust” excuse for him? Yet no such defence would be mounted for a notorious conservative such as T.S. Eliot, who has been pilloried for decades as a loathsome anti-Semite (books have even been devoted to the subject) as a result of a few comments about Jews in his writings from the 1920s and 1930s.

Other writers from the past, such as Eliot’s contemporary, D.H Lawrence, and (as we have seen) Karl Marx have not been reviled for expressing similar and, indeed, even more extreme views. In an era when the Catholic Church has been at pains to seek reconciliation with the Jewish people it has also beatified John Henry Newman, en route to canonisation. Yet Newman commented, when asked in the 1840s to support a bill to admit Jews to the British Parliament, “I cannot say I feel any desire to give the Jews privileges”.[3] So one has to seek out larger contexts of such men’s lives and times and opinions to see why some are vilified and others exonerated for using exactly the same words, expressing exactly the same attitudes.

Condemnation or exoneration can have less to do with what a person says than whom the person is who has made the remark that ignites opprobrium. Numerous examples can be found in our own day of this variation of assessment as those who police thought and speech apply their judgements selectively, depending on the more general palatability (to them), or otherwise, of a writer’s or speaker’s worldview as, gimlet-eyed, the pursed-lipped, self-appointed language censors seek out any “sexist, racist, culturalist, nationalist, regionalist, ageist, lookist, ableist, sizeist, speciesist, intellectualist, socioeconomicist, ethnocentrist, phallocentrist, heteropatriarchalist”[4] or any other hissed “ist” ripe for shaming with a zeal that would not have been out of place in witch-hunting Salem.

The same double standard can apply even to the titles of works of art. It would be unimaginable now for The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, generally accepted to be the best work of Joseph Conrad’s early period[5], to be set for study by any syllabus committee for high school or university English Literature students, merely because of one word in its title, thus depriving those students of exposure to a classic of our language. It would be another book for burning on the contemporary bonfire of the profanities and for listing in today’s Index of Prohibited Texts. Trigger warnings will need to be inserted into Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, as the word “nigger” is used several times there, such warnings prejudicing impressionable minds against the author and, so, inhibiting their appreciation of a work which, ironically, is a critique of colonialism and racial abuse.

But there would be no reluctance in listing and prescribing for study for students of visual art, The Piss Christ, the photograph by American artist, Andres Serrano, which depicts the crucified Second Person of the Holy Trinity totally immersed in a glass of the artist’s urine. No trigger warnings needed in that case! Any Christian who found such a listing offensive would be smartly ticked off with reference to Voltaire (“I disagree with what you say…” etc), “Nous sommes Charlie” and so on, principles which – for some reason that only the most tortured casuistry could support – would be withheld from The Nigger of the”‘Narcissus”.

In the context of private discourse (as in correspondence), nuances of usage can occur leading to errors of misreading and judgement on the part of those who, having entered, uninvited, upon the context of an individual’s privacy, misinterpret – through inevitable ignorance of those nuances – what was not only never intended for public consumption but not for reading by anyone other than the letter’s recipient. Today, the protection of and respect for the once-cherished rights to privacy – and freedom of speech, in private, in particular – have been undermined to the point of annihilation, especially in the spying on and theft of email correspondence. In the 1960s, it was claimed that “the personal is political”; today, the personal and private have not only become public property, but are routinely held up for judgement and condemnation by the self-righteous arbiters of “correct” opinion. So the matter of context becomes very important in assessing the validity of these readings of private material, never intended for public dissemination, but publicly exposed.

The racist, sexist and pornographic poem, “King Bolo and His Big Black Kween” – a work described by Louis Menand as consisting of “unredeeming explicitness that would almost make a rapper blush”[6] – was initiated by the young T.S. Eliot and bandied backwards and forwards in private correspondence with his fellow-American friends Ezra Pound and Conrad Aiken. Would anybody in their right mind, and not motivated by sheer malice, maintain for one moment that this crazy touretting was expressive of the essential mind of that Nobel laureate, member of the Order of Merit and the most influential (and arguably the greatest) poet of the twentieth century and the author of a vast range of extraordinarily influential literary-critical and socio-cultural books and essays and an enormous quantity of private correspondence?

It is preposterous even to suggest it but, as Christopher Hitchens has argued, this is the common procedure now of the character assassins of muck-raking journalism and anti-social media who would pluck King Bolo from the complex context of the entirety of Eliot’s life and extraordinary achievement in poetry and literature; claim (for whatever ideological purpose that destroying Eliot’s reputation might achieve) that it amounted to the fullness and entire compass of his thought and character, and condemn him – and everything about him – on the basis of it.

The reception of the posthumously-published letters of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, provides a striking example of this disreputable procedure, now commonplace and burgeoning. Their correspondence began during their undergraduate years at Oxford and retained an undergrad naughtiness, becoming more obscene and politically incorrect as the years went by, and as the public world, in contrast, progressively submitted to the censorious dictates of the totalitarian Empire of Offence and Peter Hitchens’s “dictatorship of rage”.[7] With the internet set up as the pillory, those exposed to public shaming for uttering an allegedly racist word or sexist phrase – or daring to crack a joke, even amongst friends in personal correspondence – are vilified in language of an intensity and extremity which once would have been reserved for murderers, rapists and child molesters, and, in old Puritan times, for fornicating adulterers – people, in other words, who had actually committed an offence, rather than having expressed an opinion or had private communication with their intimate circle.

Larkin’s published letters (Peter Craven has observed), particularly his letters to Kingsley Amis, were full of erotic smut about young girls and they also came with plenty of stuff that was racist and anti ordinary, working people…. But the best of the poetry is marvellous…. People who knew him said he was an extremely companionable man, kind and sensitive.[8]

So, in just a few sentences, Craven has identified no less than three Larkins (two of them, the first and the third, sharply contradictory): the “offensive” one in the private context, the great poet and the kind man in public. If we wanted to add a fourth, there was the accomplished professional who, as Librarian of the University of Hull, worked successfully and happily with many young women and “ordinary” people, students and academic colleagues for thirty years. But this is by no means the limit of the multiple contexts of the man’s life. There are several more Larkins, so to speak: the long-time lover of Monica Jones; the unexpected devotee of jazz; the humane man outraged by cruelty to animals. How could any reasonable person claim that the true, essential Larkin is the author of the occasional private japes and of middle-aged grumpy venting in his correspondence with friends, in the face of all these other Larkins? This is taking malicious selectivity to a risible extremity.

Different modes of discourse are appropriated to suit the selected personal audience you are addressing: we write differently to our mother and to our lover; to our buddies and to a senior mentor. The correspondence of “friendships and connections”, Christopher Hitchens writes, demonstrates that these can even come to “depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang”[9], a private language, and he demonstrates this in some examples from his long friendship with fellow-writer, Martin Amis. In their case, the linguistic expression of their bond is as often as not ribald and, by current thought-policed standards, “offensive”; but to the participants – consenting adults in private – it is affectionate and hilarious.

Such verbal “in” jokes are often carried on and evolved over years, as the participants strive to outdo one another in the use of particular locutions – a very familiar phenomenon, inevitably, in wordsmiths’ correspondence – and seek to improve on its edginess. If we are to presume (and by what authority?) to enter into judgement of such material (which was never intended for our eyes) and, thereby, of these individuals and – with a presumption and impertinence that astonishes – assess their moral rectitude or lack of it, then recognition of this elusive contextual element is vital and, indeed, should give us serious pause before proceeding to any commentary, let alone denunciation. It is almost the definition of a private joke that its humour is lost on outsiders. But now in the neo-Puritan dispensation of the moral police, where only “acceptable” subjects are approved for jokes, transgressive wit, even in private, is damned as “offensive”.

It is indeed an extraordinary historico-cultural phenomenon to see the Western world submitting willingly to this humourless regime of censorship – Barry Humphries’ “finger-wagging puritanism”[10] – when we consider the protracted battles that were fought against censorship through the twentieth century. Two such champions were Virginia Woolf and E.M Forster, writing a joint letter at the time of the attempted banning of the lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness: “The free mind has access to all the knowledge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo.”[11]

As in an individual’s published statements and writings, so within the corpus of a person’s private correspondence there can be a vast variation of thoughts and feelings and, indeed, if we peruse such material over several decades, remarkable changes can occur in one person’s stance on a variety of matters. Sheer common sense warns us that reading this or that letter from a correspondent, plucked from a lifetime of letter-writing, and – what must never be forgotten – with a particular recipient in mind, would give a very incomplete insight into the totality of the person’s mind and range of opinions. When the American poet, Walt Whitman, was charged with inconsistency of thought, he responded: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).[12]

Yet in our debased media culture, “so shallow and instantaneous”, as Don Watson described it in an interview the other day, and in what passes for public debate now, in which ad hominem pseudo-argument and character assassination are the principal modes, a linguistic “gotcha moment” can define and destroy a life.

The now-classic example of this egregious process is the case of Professor Sir Tim Hunt, Nobel laureate, Fellow of the Royal Society and – until he was forced to resign – Professor at London University. Attending a conference in South Korea, Sir Tim made the flippant observation, in passing, that female laboratory staff had a tendency to fall in love with their male superiors. Little did the professor realise, as he gave voice to this statement (which he said was meant to be a joke but is patently of unspeakable wickedness) that he was under surveillance.

An agent of the Thought and Speech Police, avid for the process of verbal cleansing[13] was in the audience. Instead of taking Sir Tim to task for his statement, then and there, and being done with it, this evangelist of shaming saw to it that he was denounced on anti-social media for his repellent sexism; and the execration went (as they say) viral. Without missing a beat, the authorities of London University, far from coming to the defence of their distinguished professor, said he must resign immediately, or they would dismiss him, in order to protect the good name of the institution – which, as it turns out, as a result of their actions, has been seriously tarnished.

After Today [which broke the story] was broadcast, and while Hunt was still flying back, [his wife] Mary Collins was called by University College London. She is a professor and a former dean there: “I was told by a senior that Tim had to resign immediately or be sacked – though I was told it would be treated as a low-key affair. Tim duly emailed his resignation when he got home. The university promptly announced his resignation on its website and started tweeting that they had got rid of him. Essentially, they had hung both of us out to dry. They certainly did not treat it as a low-key affair. I got no warning about the announcement and no offer of help, even though I have worked there for nearly 20 years. It has done me lasting damage. What they did was unacceptable.”[14]

Subsequently, the university said that it needed to get rid of Sir Tim in order to quell the baying mob. His career and reputation are in ruins. “I am finished,” he has said. “I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have become toxic. I have been hung [out] to dry by academic institutes who have not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.”[15] Numerous fellow Nobel laureates came to Sir Tim’s defence, but to no avail.

The punishment inflicted on this eminent 72-year-old professor for a 39-word joke would appear to be a tad out of kilter with his “crime”. But that Sir Tim had in fact broken no law and harmed nobody was of no concern to his persecutors. Richard Dawkins, in a letter to The Times, commented: “’Disproportionate’ would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that [the anecdote] unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.” But the digital lynch-mob had spoken: causa finita est. Merely express an opinion that might question, say, same-sex marriage or even register the slightest reservation about it, and you will be denounced in the mainstream media as a bigoted homophobe engaging in hate speech, while you drown in the bile spewed up in the anti-social media vomitorium. Germaine Greer has said that “if we really believe in free speech, then we have to be prepared to hear things we would prefer not to hear” and to debate them.

Indeed, the contemptible spectacle of Professor Hunt’s downfall was followed soon after, by the firestorm which engulfed Greer herself, who made the mistake of expressing an opinion about gender re-assignment that was not in lockstep with the jackbooted censors of “incorrect” thought. She opined that men who became women by this process are not “real women”. Immediately, with that precipitate rush to judgement and condemnation that characterises these processes now, her college at Cambridge, Newnham, withdrew the proposal for an honorary degree for her it was planning to submit, and Cardiff University, where she was scheduled to deliver a guest lecture, warned her that she could be physically assaulted if she attended the campus – all this as the consequence of speaking her mind.

Exasperated, Greer expostulated: “I was expressing an opinion!” In an interview on BBC’s Newsnight, she said that the way she had been treated by her alma mater was thought by some to be astonishing. “But not by me,” she added, ruefully.[16] Speaking at the Cambridge University Union’s 200^th anniversary, in 2015, Germaine Greer stood before a banner celebrating the landmark anniversary, proudly proclaiming “200 years of free speech”. Yet, within a few months, when she was exercising that very freedom, her university condemned her for it. At least the Holy Office of the Inquisition went through the motions of investigation, deliberation and debate before burning heretics at the stake. Today, instantaneous conviction without trial, shrill execration and excommunication from the institution are routine, as a phrase or a comment becomes the pillory for the annihilation of a human being. Winston Churchill once said, “A lie travels halfway round the world, while the truth is putting on its trousers.” Now, truth hasn’t even got out of bed before mendacious libels have circled the globe to remain there in cyberspace, in eternum.

That blameless-sounding but in fact morally-culpable constituency, the Silent Majority, have much to answer for in allowing the toxic tyranny of verbal cleansing so to assault the public discourse of our polity as to destroy one of the essential freedoms of a democracy, to the point now where this toxicity has become, in my assessment at least, an irreversible plague. They have stood dumbly by while individuals have been monstered by the media merely for expressing their points of view, even in private. Yet were one of these silent witnesses to be subjected to being eaten alive for his or her opinions, they would be the first to cry foul. For evil to thrive all that is necessary is for men and women to remain silent in the face of it. Nothing is more conducive to tyranny than a cowed and silenced populace.

Of particular concern, in this issue, indeed, is the degree to which universities, once the committed defenders of the freedoms of a free society, and even such venerable foundations as Cambridge, as we have seen in the Greer case, have been degraded into centres of social engineering. So grim is the situation that George Steiner recently found it necessary to affirm what once would have been taken for granted: “A true university [he wrote in 2013] serves neither political purposes nor social programmes, necessarily partisan and transitory. Above all, it rebukes censorship and correctness of any kind…. And it should honour anarchic provocation.”[17]

All that Professor Steiner is saying is that this is what the word “university” means: a place where any and every opinion can be voiced and be open to reasoned debate and discussion. A university, properly going about its business, teaches students how to think, not what to think. A friend who has published several campus novels over the years has told me that the genre is being killed off, for what is happening in and to universities today, he opined, is far more grotesque and bizarre than any fictional or satirical concoctions a novelist could devise. In Clive James’s words, those who have trashed the idea of a university, in our day, “have no idea of what free speech is or what a university is supposed to be”.[18]

Today, as the ayatollahs of political correctness roam about, seeking whom they may devour and silence, there are more taboos than ever. In what Michael Wilding has called our “climate of repression” in his latest book (which deals with these issues and especially the culture of surveillance in universities[19]), Australia has become Outragia. Another Michael, the cartoonist Leunig, has somehow managed, to date at least, not to be silenced. In a recent cartoon, he nailed what has become of our “democracy”, with his lovable big-nosed Everyman character bedevilled and oppressed by our anti-social discourse: “… the sound of constant bickering. Besmirching. Denouncing. Attacking. It’s a lovely sound and a wonderful influence on the human heart. The details are forgotten and what remains is the spirit of tribal aggression, pomposity and mean stupidity…. It is the tone that will rule the country.”[20]

It already does rule the country. Dr Kerryn Phelps called, the other day, for a “nuanced debate” on the matter of immigration. How can you have any kind of debate, courteous discussion, rational conversation, let alone a nuanced version of these, when public and political discourse has been degraded into abusive name-calling and demonisation of your opponent, and when, even in the principal setting for national debate, the federal parliament, you have all the representatives of a political party walk out of the chamber because they are not prepared to listen to the views of another elected representative of the people with which they happen to disagree? That so many politicians and commentators in the political sphere, such as Phelps, are calling repeatedly now for reasoned debate on a range of topics indicates how impossible it is becoming to achieve such a thing.

Of course, these problems are not confined to Australia. Christopher Hitchens speaks of what he calls the “norm” of “the pseudo-Left new style”, whereby “if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.”[21]

Further, once the noisy moron has sounded the public alarm, from the exalted position of impeccable moral rectitude that has given him or her the authority to cast the first stone at other people’s terrible sins, the material will be reprinted again and again by the lazy and/or the malicious.[22]

In sympathy with this view, Australian journalist Richard Glover has reflected, in the article, “Take a walk on the mild side”, that unless we are alert to the nuances of discourse we fall into a ridiculous caricature of the opposing side.[23]

As Jon Ronson puts it, in his best-seller, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, the now-commonplace process of media lynching – what he calls “our shaming frenzy” – is “like a distorting mirror at a funfair, taking human nature and making it look monstrous”.[24]

One can hardly expect the rabid ideologues and the fanatics of anti-social media today to have any respect for the courtesies of debate, let alone the subtleties of argument, language and language in context and their analysis, but when we reach the point where people reputedly of higher learning are similarly (even wilfully) ignorant of such courtesies and complexities and, what is more, are prepared to take their cues from those very ideologues and fanatics, we have indeed entered a new Dark Age.

To conclude: the lynch-mob shaming in which modern democracies demonstrably revel is routinely, spuriously justified, by its promoters, as being “in the public interest”. In fact, nothing could be more detrimental to the common good of society, given the prejudiced selectivity, interpretative distortions and malicious exaggerations which the lynching-leaders promote. Their ultimate goal, now clearly in sight, is to silence all discourse, public or private, that does not accord with opinion approved by them. How can this method – the propagation of falsehood – and this outcome – of silencing a people – be to anybody’s – let alone, the community’s – advantage? Such an oppression of language and suppression of counter-cultural ideas, whether with regard to the personal or the political sphere, degrades any free society to a domain of monocultural fascism beyond the wildest dystopic imaginings of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

Big Brother and Big Sister aren’t merely watching you, keeping you under surveillance even in your most intimate and private moments and matters, they are at the ready to rip out your tongue. It is a situation that is evil beyond words.

Endnotes

[1] ‘Arrests as PM lashes out at “white people”’, 3 August, 2015, The Sydney Morning Herald, 12.

[2] In Hitch-22, op. cit., p.420.

[3] In Rosemary Hill, Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, London, 2007), p.400.

[4] James Finn Garner, Preface to Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

[5] I am grateful to my former colleague, Emeritus Professor Michael Wilding, for reminding me of this text.

[6] ‘The Women Come and Go’, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/30/the-women-come-and-go (accessed 25 July, 2015)

[7] ‘Freedom of Speech and Right to Offend’, Oxford Union Speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trRdlNTbe0k, accessed 1/9/2015.

[8] ‘Melancholic poet created a myth around himself’, ‘Spectrum’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 3-4 January, 2015, 21.

[9] Op. cit., p.190.

[10] ‘Humphries decries “finger-wagging puritanism”’, The Australian, 28 September, 2015, 25.

[11] Nation and Athenaeum 43 (September, 1928).

[12] ‘Song of Myself’, Part 51.

[13] I think the phrase is Clive James’s, but I cannot find the reference.

[14] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/13/tim-hunt-hung-out-to-dry-interview-mary-collins

[15] Ibid.

[16] ‘KW So how do you feel that Newnham College, your own college, is considering not giving you an honorary doctorate – apparently – because of what you said about the transgender community?

GG There’s been two votes at my college about whether I should have an honorary degree and… I’m not going to get one. They’ve been turned down. Which is thought by some to be astonishing. But not by me’. (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/guest-post-transcript-of-newsnight-interview-with-germaine-greer/)

[17] George Steiner (‘Universitas’ Lecture, Part III, 2013)

[18] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/07/clive-james-the-verbal-tics-of-germaine-greers-trolls-affirm-the-blustering-carelessness-of-the-web

[19] In the Valley of the Weed, containing a chapter, ‘The Surveillance University’. I am grateful to Michael for showing me the MS prior to publication later this year.

[20] ‘The Sound of Democracy’, The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Spectrum’, 13-14 August, 2016, 3.

[21] Op.cit., p.345.

[22] Op,cit., p.259.

[23] Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, 18-19 July, 2015, 3.

[24] So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead Books, New York, 2015), pp.[91), 237.