I’ve been teaching my own courses for the first time since January this year — something I’ve found enormously rewarding and quite a lot of fun. Designing classes has me reaching back to a classic essay which remains a favourite of mine: Carlo Ginzburg’s “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” published in…

Self-explanatory title. But more detail: the poetry.sg website on the Penang poet Margaret Leong (1921 to 2012) says this of one of her books: “A third book of poetry, Coral Sands, was in preparation, but as of yet no evidence of its publication exists.” I can’t find the book in the catalogues of the National…

We don’t often think of Singapore as being stratigraphic. That is, layered with history. Different times, or horizons, or universes, worlds, regimes (not yet sure of the right word) butting up against each other. But walking here shows it very evidently the case. Photograph: Jack Greatrex, the Shell petrol station on Serangoon Road with the…

I have never much enjoyed writing conference speeches and making PowerPoints — which I am doing now, finalising them in a hotel in Takamatsu, Shikoku, Japan. For some academics, the joy in their work comes from a certain sense of solidity — knowing as much as can be known about a topic, and laying out…

There is a whole publishing sub-industry now of books for academics on how to write academic books. I’m using William Germano’s From Dissertation to Book (2013) for my own monograph, which I am revising ahead of a deadline of February 2026. These books turn the formidable task of writing a monograph into a neat sequence…

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929) has a superb phrase for a certain kind of joy: “the lamp in the spine.” This is in the context of eating: “One cannot think well,” Woolf writes, “love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light…