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-...

With the continuing protests over the death of George Floyd spilling into other protests, especially in Britain, with campaigns to remove statues and other monuments honouring slave-owners and imperialist figures, here is a feature I wrote twenty years ago on the...

I wrote the following feature seventeen years ago. It was published in August 2003 in the Andersonstown News and is as relevant now as it was then, because racism remains pervasive, both subtle and explicit - clearly in the USA, as witness the killing of George Floyd,...

Every year Japan sets aside a day to mark ‘Respect for the Aged Day’. I think it is something that legislators in Leinster House and Stormont should consider, even though symbolic, as a measure of raising awareness about our elderly citizens. Here is a newspaper...