Oct 28, 2013 | Latest
Last Saturday, as chair of Féile an Phobail, I hosted the book launch of Lethal Allies by Anne Cadwallader of the Pat Finucane Centre. A very large crowd attended the event in St Mary’s University College to hear harrowing accounts of state collusion with...
Oct 22, 2013 | Latest
BBC’s flagship documentary programme Spotlight is, incredibly, forty years old this week! I remember watching it back in October 1973 in Cage 2, Long Kesh, along with seventy other internees on a small black and white television mounted on the back wall of the...
Oct 3, 2013 | Latest
Finished Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. And I am left scratching my head and asking myself what was it all about. It wasn’t so much the talking cats that I had a problem with or that the eponymous 15-year-old character had sex with his mother and sister...
Sep 9, 2013 | Latest
Finished Women by Charles Bukowski, a hilarious romp about women, sex, drugs and alcohol, written in the first person by Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical character, Henry Chinaski. On ego & ‘greatness’ Chinaski reflects: “There is a problem with writers. If...
Aug 23, 2013 | Latest
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...
Aug 13, 2013 | Latest
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...
