Last night I was at the Irish Embassy in London to give a lecture about George Boole, the great Victorian mathematician and the first Professor of Mathematics at my alma mater, University College Cork. It was a gratifyingly packed house, but the most unexpected discovery was that the Ambassador, Dan Mulhall, not only runs a rather good personal blog, but that he is also a Joyce enthusiast. Here, for example, is the text of the lecture on the ‘Cyclops’ chapter in Ulysses that he delivered on Bloomsday at the York Festival of Ideas. It’s pretty good IMHO.

My only complaint is that — like an increasing number of people — he persists in using the term ‘blog’ when in fact he means “blog post “. But I suspect that I am on a losing battle on this. I’m beginning to sound like the pedants of the 1950s who objected to people calling transistor-powered portable radios “transistors”. Sigh.