‘Good Vibrations’

Finished ‘More Lives Than One – a biography of Hans Fallada’ by Jenny Williams, a Professor of Literature at Dublin City University. 15th June. Interviewed by Joseph McCabe from Dublin, a student at Queens whose MA dissertation is titled: Republicans and Policing;...

Mama Kaz in East Belfast

Represented Feile an Phobail, along with Geraldine McAteer and Angela Mervyn, at a fundraiser in Shorts Social Club for the inaugural East Belfast Arts Festival which gets off the ground this September. We were warmly welcomed and received and I spoke to a number of...

A Small Circus – Fallada

Finished ‘A Small Circus’ by Hans Fallada. Love his writing though this would not be on a par with ‘Alone in Berlin’. It is set around 1928/1929 in a small provincial German town and opens with a cattle seizure by bailiffs followed by the consequences for the police,...

Rolling Stone Interviews

Finished the ‘Rolling Stone Interviews’, published 2007. Pete Townshend on what comes first: “When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try...

Montalbano

Finished ‘The Shape of Water’ by Andrea Camilleri from which the series currently running on BBC4 on Saturday nights has been adapted, ‘Inspector Montalbano’. This is the ‘First Inspector Montalbano Mystery’. It is full of little quotes which enrich the work. For...

Love Matters

‘Love Matters’ by Gary Mitchell is much in the vein of his ‘Billy’ plays, so-to-speak, which deal critically and show little sympathy with the domestic lives of loyalist paramilitaries, usually the UDA (which actually drove Mitchell out of his North Belfast home). I...