Apr 14, 2018 | Features
I wrote this feature in May 2005: some thoughts about perennial war and how people rationalise their justifications for their actions. I was reminded of it when I saw on Twitter today a reference to Robert Oppenheimer (the American theoretical physicist in the...
Apr 10, 2018 | Features
Really enjoyed this novel, a crime/political thriller set in Cuba and written by former Uruguayan Tuparmaro guerrilla Daniel Chavarría. It is stylish, intelligent, dark, amusing and a bit raunchy. Aldo Bianchi and his girlfriend Teresita were once arrested by Alberto...
Apr 6, 2018 | Features
I see that Ed Moloney, one of the godfathers behind the disastrous Boston College Oral History Archive – the project that launched a thousand subpoenas – is up for an Oscar. Only joking. But I see that a film co-produced by Ed Moloney and written by...
Mar 28, 2018 | Features
An old roué, Jirka, a retired shoemaker, in one breathless address, often course and absurd, is regaling some young ladies and tells them of another group of young ladies he also used to habitually address, six prostitutes (his ‘beauties’) out sunbathing in their back...
Mar 26, 2018 | Features
Read several books while I was away in Cuba. Also got to visit the grave in Havana of one of the authors, Alejo Carpentier, whose book The Kingdom of This World was published in 1957. Carpentier died in 1980. It tells the story of the black uprising against French...
Mar 20, 2018 | Features
As Frank González and I got out of the car we could hear the squeals and laughter of young children enjoying their mid-morning break in the hot sunshine. It reminded me of my old St Teresa’s, except no flag flew from a pole in our schoolyard and we never enjoyed such...
