Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives…

One of the consequences of globalisation in recent years has been the unprecedented spread of English as the world's lingua franca. This has particular resonance in postcolonial countries, such as Pakistan and Australia, whose histories have been strongly shaped by English colonisers in contrasting ways. Written from the perspective of someone who…

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, on 18 March 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the immediate closure of schools in England. (The closure was not absolute: schools would remain open for vulnerable children and the children of key workers. In practice, though, very few children have continued to attend.) In what follows, nine English…

In this paper, I narrate highlights of my long process of learning and teaching English as a foreign language in mainland China and Australia, presenting a picture of the practices of learning and teaching English in mainland China from the bottom up. Over the past 50 years, English learners in mainland China, as Gao Yihong has written, have…

In this reflective piece, Karl Miller looks down the lens at an ancient world, once his own. He does so with the help of a memoir, "Rebecca's Vest," which he published much later, in the mid-1990s: a mid-term report in which he describes how he became a reader and about what he read. With the end of the term approaching, he offers a…

The film scholar Robin Wood, who died recently, taught me English during the mid-1960s at Welwyn Garden City High School (now Sir Frederick Osborn Comprehensive). He was one of those teachers who "made a difference". He helped me learn that it was all right for a boy from a working-class home to study stuff such as literature. But it was…