Roddy Doyle’s Charlie Savage is the best remedy for a bad mood or a feeling that life is going too fast Continue reading
Filed under Book review …
Recalling Daniel Mannix
Morgan’s book, The Mannix Era, is richly personal. It is written with considerable charm and an acerbic wit. But to read it in 2019 is to be overwhelmed by its masculinist perspective. Continue reading
Romantic Ireland – not dead and gone.
Christopher Kock belongs to a small but select class – he was a proud Irish Tasmanian and literary. Continue reading
Personal Reflections Inspired by A New History of the Irish in Australia
At the outset I must remark that all who are interested in the story of the Irish in ‘The Great South Land Under The Southern Cross’ will forever be indebted to the exceptional scholarship of two enormously talented historians, Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall. Continue reading
Who Watches the Watchers?
It is easy to appreciate the difficulty of policing in a place where a fugitive can escape into a different country by simply crossing a bridge or driving over a division in the road. Continue reading
Creeslough does Troy
For the modern reader of Homer, reading battle narratives can be a challenge. They are a genre Homer’s audience knew well and in which they can follow his every move. For us it is more difficult, but not when we’re in Daniel Kelly’s hands. Continue reading
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
A Book Review by Steve Carey Colm Toibin: Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers oWilde, Yeats, and Joyce. Picador, 2018. RRP: $29.99 [price at Readings] ISBN: 9781760781149 Originating as the 2017 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature at Emory University, Tόibín’s little book is a meditation on three very different Dublin dads and their literary lads. At … Continue reading
From the papers
What’s in the news…. Continue reading
A Prize Winning Novel that Divides its Critics
The most disconcerting aspect of Milkman is that it sits so easily in the definition of Northern Ireland as an inevitably enduring site of sectarianism. Continue reading
From Tallaght to the Senate
Lynne Ruane had left school at 14, though it appears that her attendance there was often sporadic. She was smoking and drinking and had graduated to drugs … Continue reading