In the winter of 1999 I gave a series of lectures at Queen’s university about some recent results concerning the Cohen-Macaulay property of invariants of Hopf algebras. Tony Geramita asked me to write up my notes for the Queen’s Papers, and I happily took up his suggestion. Although this article focuses on the proof of one main theorem (Theorem 2.11 on page 12), it has some of the character of ...