Ars gratia artis and the morganatic marriage: 'Let us not to the marriage of true minds...'.

As a young boy, I, with my mates, used to queue up at the local Clayfield picture theatre every Saturday afternoon.Those days were the days when a ‘zack’ was a sixpence, admission was a shilling and a feast of lollies was tuppence. Unlike today, the flicks always had a trailer before the main feature preceded by the black and white Movietone News. We waited expectantly for the MGM lion to roar as the curtain drew back. Under the lion was the motto ‘Ars gratia artis’, which long sticks in my memory because years later I studied the so-called dead Latin language at school. ‘Art for art’s sake’, which brings me to the reason for this preamble. The succinct language of Ovid and Virgil, which was the source of such painstaking scholarship in my adolescence, captures an ideal that brings me to university teaching and teaching for the love of it.