There have been several lucrative spin-offs for some of those behind the debacle that is Boston College’s Belfast Project, which included former IRA Volunteers being encouraged to incriminate themselves and old comrades on the understanding that their statements...

My review of Paramilitarism – Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State by Uğur Ümit Üngör was published in the Irish Examiner, 21 November. ONE night RUC Detective ‘Jonty’ Brown stopped a furniture lorry containing five men and a youth. Inside, a revolver and a...

Inventory - A Family Portrait of Derry’s Troubled Past By Darran Anderson, Vintage, £8.99, 320pp My review in The Irish Examiner, 3 October, 2020 THERE have been many excellent memoirs written from the northern nationalist perspective. Among the best are Bernadette...

The Tainted by Cauvery Madhavan, HopeRoad Publishing, £9.99 p/b, 336pp My review in The Irish Examiner, 19 September, 2020 WHERE is ‘home’? Cauvery Madhavan’s third novel transports us to India, 1920, and life for British soldiers based in the Nandagiri hillside...

Finished the brilliant Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell (publ.1959), a wry story about a suburban and dutiful American middle-class wife, Mrs India Bridge, before and after WWII, who is suffering from a sort of ‘Post-Traumatic Living Disorder’. Glen Campbell’s 1960s’...

Today is the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb over the city of Hiroshima, followed a few days later by the bombing of Nagasaki. This is a feature I wrote about the two bombings which was first published in 2004. Charles Sweeney was born in...

My ‘Scribes’ interview for this year’s virtual Féile an Phobail with author Cauvery Madhavan is now available on YouTube here. Cauvery has written three novels – Paddy Indian, The Uncoupling and her latest The Tainted, released in May 2020, has received rave reviews....

As part of Féile an Phobail's virtual Scribes at the Rock I interviewed the New Jersey-based writer Colin Broderick, a former native of Tyrone, about his two extraordinary memoirs, That’s That and Orangutan, which deal with his troubled childhood, oppression and war,...

My review of Moroccan Aziz BineBine's biography about his eighteen years of torture in the dungeons of Tazmamart was published in last Saturday's Irish Examiner. Tazmamart was translated from the French by Lulu Norman and is published by Haus - pp. 190. £14.99 -oo0oo-...