While the setting and the craic is unmistakably Dublin, the literary tour embraces some Irish writers (Swift, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan) but mostly lashes out at English classics – the revenge of a supremely gifted Irish writer on English letters. Continue reading
Beside such extreme acts of violence, ordinary life was of course lived ordinarily, decently, by scores of citizens. The vast majority of people wanted no truck with the killing. Continue reading
It is not just landscape and history and personal objects and events that shape us, but also the more casual and systematic reading we do …. Continue reading
Public Debate: ‘Is it time for a Republic of Australia?’ Continue reading
Book Review by James McCaughey Colm Toibin House of Names, Picador. May 2017 RRP: $29.99 h/b 261 pp ISBN: 978 1760 551421 The ancient Greeks have left us a legacy of myths. Some of them are still current – the stories of Oedipus or Antigone, for instance. Others, though less known, the story of Pygmalion say, have … Continue reading
Birds amplify
the silence; their calls,
borne on the wind’s leafy roar,
lodge in the mind, the marrow. Continue reading
Handed such a whiffy text, director Wayne Pearn took a deep breath and turned it into a play piece of encaptivating ingenuity Continue reading
this island scorns, defies life
from sunrise to the midnight moon
James Joyce’s literary masterpiece IS to be sniffed at. Continue reading
Poems full of time telling of many stories and of many lives. Continue reading
Tinteán 