From 1968 to 2015, I was a lecturer in literature in my home country of Australia. My first appointment was to James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. We left Townsville for family reasons in 2007, and until 2015 I was a casual lecturer and tutor in literature at Griffith University, which has campuses at Nathan, near Brisbane, and at the Gold Coast, also in Queensland.

I have a BA (Hons) degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Queensland, an MA in English Language and Medieval English Literature from the University of Leeds in England, and a Ph. D. from James Cook University. I wrote my Ph. D. thesis on works in Latin and English by three fourteenth-century spiritual writers, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

Sharing my love of literature with students in lectures and tutorials has been an honour, a privilege, and a joy. Reading good stories, novels and poems is a pathway to a better understanding of ourselves and others, and it can also help us to formulate our ethics and philosophy of life.

I’ve always enjoyed writing out my lectures in full, so over a long career I’ve accumulated many lecture scripts. They are all original, and all on literary topics.

I want to make my scripts freely available on this website, in the hope that they’ll benefit, or if not, at least entertain, any students and readers who share my love of “literary” literature.