Michael McMahon
Biography
Michael McMahon - Fifty-year-old freelance writer, journalist and broadcaster Michael McMahon is a larger-than-life character and passionate communicator. From 1985 - 1990 he was an English master at Gresham's School, Holt, where his 1987 open-air production of the mystery play The Fall of Lucifer is burned into the collective memory: the angels fell down a death-slide over the heads of the audience, and landed on a gravelled stage upon which a gallon of four-star petrol was lit. The roar and smell are still remembered; the boys' shoes caught fire, but they carried on acting. There was only one performance.From 1990 to 1992 Michael McMahon was headmaster of a third-rate provincial prep school, which he dragged kicking and screaming into the 1950s. He then returned to Norfolk , where he accepted a post as a front-line teacher in a struggling inner-city comprehensive in Norwich . After the original culture-shock, he established a working relationship with even the most difficult of the school's damaged and underprivileged students, and taught happily and successfully until a government inspection declared the school to be failing and imposed a punishment regime under which he refused to serve. He quit.
Michael McMahon now earns his living by writing and broadcasting on issues that amuse, enthuse, inspire or anger him. His contempt for the conveyor-belt culture of contemporary education has been published widely in columns and op-eds in all our national broadsheets and weeklies. He has written widely about places he has visited and people he has met. In England , he is most frequently published in The Spectator , to which he has contributed pen portraits of Burgos , Rome , Umbria , The Pyrenees, the Charente, the Canal du Midi, the Vercors and East Anglia . His recently published work includes a comic look at kipping in convents ( The Spectator , February 5th 2005) and memoirs of his visits to Batumi in the Georgian Republic and to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela ( Chronicles , January and February 2005).
Michael is currently writing An Extraordinary Garthering of Saints (MQP) to be published in Spring 2006, and has written two editions of Shakespeare plays for schools, the Cliff's Complete Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One (2000) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2001).
Michael McMahon now earns his living by writing and broadcasting on issues that amuse, enthuse, inspire or anger him. His contempt for the conveyor-belt culture of contemporary education has been published widely in columns and op-eds in all our national broadsheets and weeklies. He has written widely about places he has visited and people he has met. In England , he is most frequently published in The Spectator , to which he has contributed pen portraits of Burgos , Rome , Umbria , The Pyrenees, the Charente, the Canal du Midi, the Vercors and East Anglia . His recently published work includes a comic look at kipping in convents ( The Spectator , February 5th 2005) and memoirs of his visits to Batumi in the Georgian Republic and to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela ( Chronicles , January and February 2005).
Michael is currently writing An Extraordinary Garthering of Saints (MQP) to be published in Spring 2006, and has written two editions of Shakespeare plays for schools, the Cliff's Complete Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One (2000) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2001).
Books
