Treasure Island

Finished Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and I was transported back to Glen Road CBS in the mid-sixties, innocence, reading, and being off in other worlds. The film of the book I always associate with Robert Newton in the role of Long John Silver. And, of...

‘Operation Massacre’

One night in 1956 the Argentinian writer Rodolfo Walsh was in a café in La Plata where he would play chess and talk about literature with friends. Here, six months earlier, when he was also playing chess, there had been a shoot-out at the time of a failed Peronist...

No-No Boy

Finished No-No Boy by John Okada who died in obscurity aged 47 in 1970 believing that Asian America had rejected his work. This was his only published novel. When no one showed any interest in him his wife burnt the remainder of his writings. The novel, which was...

‘Where there’s singing…’

Finished Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun (pic, left), which was first published in Germany in 1938 before being banned, and which is told from eight-year-old Kully’s point of view, the daughter of exiled/wandering emigré parents whose father is a writer, a...

Etcetera Theatre Launched

Was at the Linenhall Library today for the launch of a new theatre company aimed at giving expression to that lumpen section of the unionist community who for a variety of reasons feel marginalized and demonized and who have rarely received a ‘good’ press. Etcetera...