May 14, 2014 | Features
Ten years ago, in 2004, I wrote two features about the conduct of the British army in Iraq. One was ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ – comparing the British army killing of Danny McCooey in Belfast in 1977 with the British army killing of Baha Mousa in...
Apr 26, 2014 | Features
On 8th March, the weekend section of the Irish Times devoted a full broadsheet page to an astonishing photograph showing a backstreet Belfast scene from the early 1960s of a young, smiling Seamus Heaney, in an Aran sweater, surrounded by about fifteen joyous kids, at...
Feb 17, 2014 | Features
Was on Radio Ulster’s The Nolan Show today about the campaign by some Celtic supporters to put a hunger strike song, Roll of Honour by the Irish Brigade into the BBC charts. I am not a soccer supporter – I prefer Gaelic football and rugby. In 2004 I wrote...
Feb 12, 2014 | Features
The New York Review Books Classics, which started in 1999, is a treasure trove of fiction and non-fiction and includes titles from the traditional canon but also books from across the world that fell into obscurity or that had not been translated into English. I have...
Feb 11, 2014 | Features
Discredited informer Raymond Gilmour, one-time citizen of Derry, has been resurrected in the media and by those opposed to Sinn Féin in order to attack Martin McGuinness. However, few of those journalists – particularly, Tony Allen in the Belfast Telegraph...
Feb 10, 2014 | Features
Last November I was on a book tour of southern Germany and Switzwerland regarding my novel, Rudi – In The Shadow of Knulp. At Staatliche FosBos in Munich Dr Wolfgang Streit of the school’s English Department invited me to do a reading in front of 150...
