Hugh Leonard Obituary

Hugh Leonard was a notable dramatist and a very successful television scriptwriter, but he always saw himself as an outsider among his peers and was quick to take offence at perceived slights from critics or fellow playwrights. Indeed, in his long-running Sunday Independent column (and before that in Hibernia magazine), he was adept both at […]

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HAVE YOU SEEN…?

A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. By David Thomson. If you love good prose, provocative insights and witty putdowns and have even a passing interest in the movies, this is the year’s most engaging book. Thomson is an Englishman who moved to the West Coast of America in the 1970s, from where he has been […]

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Buddy Holly – Sunday Miscellany

Like Don McLean, I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride, but I do recall that my sister was inconsolable when news of Buddy Holly’s death came through on the wireless. That was only to be expected, as Buddy Holly was Mary’s first hero. Being younger and belonging to a […]

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Colum McCann wins National Book Award in the US

On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe – if we’re Francophiles – the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]

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CHARLIE BIRD’S ARCTIC JOURNEY

So the first stage of an incredible, awe-inspiring adventure is now fulfilled – an adventure that has led one man from humble beginnings and years of sefless service on behalf of his community to the pinnacle of the world and all the challenges that represents. No, I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s inauguration as US […]

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Blood of the Irish; Christianity…

Ninety minutes into Blood of the Irish (RTE1), a two-part investigation into how our ancestors got here, presenter Diarmuid Gavin sat in an ocean-tossed  currach and was suddenly convinced that these early migrants must have “come by boat.” This was probably news to anyone who’d assumed that they’d arrived on a Ryanair flight, but to […]

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Michael jackson; Hector at Ballydoyle…

At Tuesday’s memorial concert for Michael Jackson, Motown founder Berry Gordy described his former employee as “the greatest entertainer that ever lived,” a judgment clearly endorsed by all those television channels which opted to jettison normal programming in order to accommodate live coverage of this funereal love-in to a dead singer. If you grew tired […]

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ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS by Irene Nemirovsky

Here is another masterpiece by Irene Nemirovsky, the Jewish emigre from St Petersburg who fled to France with her family in 1919 and became a bestselling novelist there until her capture by the Germans in 1942 and her subsequent death in Auschwitz at the age of thirty-eight. Her posthumous fame is largely due to the […]

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Brian Friel

Brian Friel’s distinguished playwriting career over five decades has been notable for its range and diversity. His concerns have encompassed the history and politics of Ireland, as well as its social and religious divides, and these have been memorably addressed in such plays as The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, Translations and Making History. Yet […]

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Boy and Man. By Niall Williams.

Niall Williams’s novels have a considerable readership, both here and abroad, and it’s not hard to see why. Since the publication of Four Letters of Love 1n 1997 he’s been offering a view of life that puts great stock in chance, coincidence, yearning and questing as ways of leading to personal fulfilment and spiritual redemption. […]

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1968 Miscellany

I was in UCD in May 1968 but I was no college radical. For one thing, I was far too busy belatedly cramming for my finals in English language and literature to bother my barney about the state of the world or the nation or even the academic injustices that were so exercising my fellow […]

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Leaving Ardglass. By William King.

Leaving Ardglass is the very dull title of a very good book, one of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time. I hadn’t heard of its author before and on learning that he is a parish priest in Drumcondra I feared that this story of a young Kerryman who […]

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Leaving Ardglass

By William King. The Lilliput Press. €12.99 Leaving Ardglass is the very dull title of a very good book, one of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time. I hadn’t heard of its author before and on learning that he is a parish priest in Drumcondra I feared that […]

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GREENE’S BOOKSHOP

The first genuine books I ever read – not The Secret Seven, not Biggles Sweeps the Desert, not even The Wind in the Willows, but real books with adult thoughts and feelings – came courtesy of Rathmines public library, where I spent too many evenings of my teenage years. Yet even though a library is […]

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Brian Friel

Brian Friel’s distinguished playwriting career over five decades has been notable for its range and diversity. His concerns have encompassed the history and politics of Ireland, as well as its social and religious divides, and these have been memorably addressed in such plays as The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, Translations and Making History. Yet […]

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Tribute to doomed flight beset by heavy baggage

On the Saturday before the November 1984 Beaujolais air crash I met Evening Herald editor Niall Hanley at a rugby international in Lansdowne Road. As a journalist with the Evening Press, I had been belatedly invited on the plane trip, which was scheduled for the following Tuesday, but hadn’t confirmed my acceptance.

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Kenneth Grahame

Mention the name of Kenneth Grahame to most people and, if they recognise it at all, they’ll think of The Wind in the Willows, which was published a hundred years ago this summer. And a lovely book it is, too, one of the most imaginative and enduring of children’s fantasies in the English language. Grahame, […]

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Paris

Although the great Irish short story writer Maeve Brennan lived for most of her adult life in Manhattan, only a small section of it seemed like home to her. Writing of her alter ego, The Long-Winded Lady, she confessed that large areas of the city were “a blank to her. She knows next to nothing […]

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John McGahern

You can’t go home again, the American writer Thomas Wolfe declared in the title of one of his most famous books. John McGahern would not have agreed. After years spent in Dublin, London and further afield, he returned three decades ago to the countryside of his birth and remained there until his untimely death yesterday. […]

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Bloomsday 1904 – 2004

On the centenary of literature’s most famous day, why we should still rejoice (and read Joyce) Today marks the centenary of a man who never existed, or at least who never existed outside the imagination of a writer and his readers. Yet this non-existent man is perhaps more real to a lot of those readers […]

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