Malcolm Coates Writing

Reflections on my 2025 reading: Looking back at the books I finished in 2025, the two standouts were The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both by Kazuo Ishiguro. Both of them deal with tragic, broken people who refuse to see themselves that way. The first is about an elderly butler who has dedicated his life to supporting a grand old English estate, led by an aristocrat who has signed up to the appeasement of the Nazis. Only at the end of his lonely life does he question what it cost him to support such a project with all of his abilities. The second is about a group of students whose sole purpose in life is donating their vital organs to serve humanity. They do not resist their fate - they understand and accept it. In both works, Ishiguro treats all of his characters, no matter what they are going through, with dignity. Neither book tells you how to think about the characters or plot - they are simply facts, and we, the reader, can freely judge or interpret. On their own, ea...

        Traveling through Ireland, you can often be forgiven for questioning which country you are in. The green, white, red, and black of the Palestinian flag can be seen flying from houses, bus stops, traffic poles, and public parks. In some ways, this is unremarkable, in that they are flown in London or Berlin, but what adds significance to this is the often accompanied phrase “Two Nations, One Struggle”. It is clear that to many who fly these flags, Ireland’s tortured history is reflected in the cause for a Palestinian state. On the surface, there are striking parallels between these two histories. Both view themselves as underdogs resisting imperial domination. Before 1169, the Irish had an independent, decentralised island that the English claimed and settled, with periodic wars and forced transfers of population and land. Eventually, Ireland was partitioned along religious lines, and Belfast remains divided by forty-five foot “Peace Walls” that separa...

       A few months ago I was in a lecture hall listening to a presentation about using artificial intelligence in classrooms, and the presenter prompted us to pull out our phones and anonymously submit lessons we routinely teach that could incorporate AI. While other teachers were submitting lessons about robotics or life on Mars, I punched in “The Protestant Reformation”, and hit send. When my response appeared on the board, the presenter read it in with a sense of bewilderment - and then mimed as if she was about to vomit. Oh well. The events of the beginning of the sixteenth century in Central Europe might cause most people - even the well educated - to start thinking about their weekend plans as their eyes glaze over, but it matters. My students could explain how it forever divided Christendom, or what we now refer to as “The West”, how it defined Europe’s political boundaries, and how it led to centuries of wars and lasting impacts on the developments of Americ...

On 21 May, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa traveled to Washington, in the hopes of resetting his trade relationship with the United States after President Donald Trump levied thirty percent tariffs and claimed that the South African government was complicit in a genocide of South Africa’s white farmers. On the face of it, this claim is risible. The United Nations defines genocide as the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group’.  Over thirty years after the end of Apartheid, the minority white population still owns the majority of the land. The ministers in charge of agriculture and prisons are both white Afrikaners. The white population is stable. The Afrikaners, in short, are not facing genocide. But South Africa is complicated. Its idiosyncrasies make it hard to compare it with other countries, even if one has a strong understanding of African or colonial history. It is easy to get bogged down in the wars and the organised...

Originally published on my Facebook feed.  *** Reflections on my 2024 reading: The most significant reading experience I had this year was James Joyce’s Ulysses . I call it a “reading experience” because I read and listened to the text, read Don Gifford’s book of annotations, Richard Elmann’s biography of Joyce, and revisited The Odyssey . Was all of it worth it? To quote from Ulysseys : “yes.” I felt like the book was one gigantic test, stretching my abilities of comprehension to new limits - in a way that was (mostly) enjoyable. I enjoyed reading Leopold Bloom’s odyssey around Dublin, his descent into Hades (a funeral), his encounter with the Sirens (barmaids), his battle with the Cyclops (a vicious anti-semite), Circe’s captivity (hallucinations in a brothel), and his return to Ithaca to reunite with Telamachus and Penelope (7 Eccles Street, Stephen and Molly). I enjoyed the way each chapter has its own style (the last one really is a fifty page long sentence), and trying to tea...