Jul 14, 2021 | Latest
My review of Rachel Kushner’s book of essays, The Hard Crowd, was published in last Saturday’s Arts Section of the Irish Examiner. Here it is: THE title derives from lyrics of a Cream song, White Room: ‘At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd.’ It...
May 13, 2021 | Latest
I stood in front of the gates to his long driveway. The £5m house, inside a two-acre walled garden, was huge for a one-parent family (with no family), but I smirked with satisfaction at the fact that the council had forgotten to take down the sign.* When I was growing...
May 9, 2021 | Latest
Andrée Murphy reviews the recently published memoir, Where Grieving Begins, by former IRA Volunteer Pat Magee, with a foreword by Jo Berry whose father was killed in the Brighton Bombing. It is published by Pluto Press. Pat was sentenced to multiple terms of life...
Apr 23, 2021 | Latest
24 April is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Some years ago I wrote about one consequence of those mass killings for some of its perpetrators in my book, Rebel Columns. Here it is republished for the anniversary. A STORY OF REVENGE ‘They took everyone away… They...
Mar 20, 2020 | Latest
On this day in March 1964 Brendan Behan died at the age of forty one from alcoholism. Before he became an internationally-acclaimed author he worked as a house painter and also joined the IRA, initially as a courier. Behan was a friend and comrade of my Uncle Harry, a...
Jan 8, 2020 | Latest
Today is the twelfth anniversary of the death of David Ervine, leader of the PUP and a former UVF prisoner. I interviewed him in 2002 in his office at Stormont where he was an MLA. There has been much speculation down the years about whether loyalism would be in the...
