FRANK: The Making of a Legend by James Kaplan

Dolly Sinatra was a tough woman. A midwife and a back-street abortionist – nicknamed “Hatpin Dolly” and twice arrested for the latter activity – she was a formidable figure both as a mini-Mafia figure in her rough-and-tumble New Jersey neighbourhood and also in the confines of her home, where she inflicted hard love on her […]

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How short can a short story be?

Brevity, as Shakespeare noted,  is the soul of wit, which is probably one of the reasons why some readers cherish the lyric poem over the epic and the short story over the novel. But how short can a short story be before it loses all substance and meaning? Very short, indeed, in the view of […]

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Shakespeare and Company – Sunday Miscellany

Shakespeare and Company is one of the most famous bookshops in the world but for fifty years it’s been living under false pretences. Situated on the quays in Paris, just around the corner from Boulevard St Michel and facing the side of Notre Dame, it’s been a place of pilgrimage by tourists who want to […]

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The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold loves to grab you with her opening lines. Her 1999 memoir, Lucky, begins: “In the tunnel where I was raped,  a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.” Her first […]

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THE PRIEST By Gerard O’Donovan

Thomas Harris has a lot to answer for. There had been serial killers in fiction before he came along, of course, but Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs set the template for what is now a staple, indeed a cliché, of contemporary crime writing, and there are few authors entering the field who […]

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John McCormack: Sunday Miscellany

When John McCormack was at the pinnacle of his popular fame, Rachmaninov said to him: “John, you sing a good song well but you sing a bad song magnificently.” Rachmaninov was not alone in this lofty view of the songs that McCormack favoured, especially in the latter half of his career when he had abandoned […]

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maeve brennan

In another life, Maeve Brennan could have been my mother, and in a way I see her as such. Born within two years of each other, they were Dubliners from neighbouring suburbs – my mother from Richmond Hill in Rathmines, Maeve from Cherryfield Avenue, a mile away in Ranelagh. Both of them were thin, petite, […]

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TV Review

Having written last Saturday about the programmes I had most admired in the past twelve months, it was with some degree of interest that I tuned into Ireland’s Top TV Moments, a compilation of what 3e deemed to be the most riveting television occasions of 2010. Puzzlingly, nothing that I had singled out featured in […]

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Francois Truffaut

Ever since I was a teenager and saw Les Quatre Cents Coups in the Fine Arts Cinema Club that used to exist in the basement of Busaras, Francois Truffaut has been one of my heroes. It was in that movie – made 50 years ago this summer, though showing no signs of ageing – that […]

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Pat’s substance will win out over style

THOSE of us who’ve managed to get through our lives without listening to RTE 2fm — certainly not in the evening and hardly ever in the morning, even when Gerry Ryan was in situ — will be bidding adieu to Ryan Tubridy later in the summer when he moves from his 9am Radio 1 slot […]

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The Frontline; Gary Glitter…

Alan O’Brien’s tirade from the audience on last Monday’s edition of The Frontline (RTE1) was an outburst waiting to happen, and I’m only surprised such an expression of fury at the salaries of top broadcasters hadn’t occurred sooner – on Pat Kenny’s morning radio programme, say, or the Marian Finucane Show or Joe Duffy’s Liveline: […]

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Jason Byrne; Baz Ashmawy; Maeve Higgins; Nurse Jackie

Announcing RTE’s autumn and winter schedule a few weeks ago, the station’s new director of programming Steve Carson promised us shows that would “innovate and entertain, inform and initiate,” while his superior Noel Curran vowed that our viewing experience would be enriched by “quality Irish programmes.” Alas, the road to hell is paved with the […]

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Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen, can you believe it, will be 73 this September, more cool now than he’s ever been, with the soul of a poet and the soulfulness of the greatest singers. Just as hard to credit is that it’s almost forty years ago since he recorded his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, from whose […]

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Why I Love Essays

It’s almost ten years since Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, created such a stir – and a well-deserved one at that – among critics and readers. Since then, she’s written other novels (On Beauty, her updating of EM Forster’s Howards End, was especially intriguing) but more and more you’ll find her writing lengthy pieces […]

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Young Irish & Wealthy; Riviera Cocktail

In July last year, just as the country was heading into economic meltdown, RTE chose to rebroadcast a programme it had first screened the previous winter. Presented by Craig Doyle, it was called Ireland’s Top Earners and I wrote at the time that “with spectacular disregard for the sensitivities of the down-trodden public, this 100-minute […]

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American Caesars

Lives of the US Presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to George W Bush. By Nigel Hamilton. Bodley Head Caligula, the vilest of the Caesars, snarled at someone who criticised his actions. “Bear in mind,” he said, “that I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” Almost two thousand years later, in an unguarded aside, George […]

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David Marcus

I have had many editors in a long career in journalism, but it was the Irish Press’s literary editor, David Marcus, who left the most lasting impression on me. Even before joining the paper at the age of 22, I had submitted poems to its New Irish Writing page and David had published some of […]

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TAKING PICTURES. By Anne Enright.

In the introduction to her 1996 Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant had some sound advice for readers. “Stories are not chapters of novels,” she pointed out. “They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” […]

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Gay Byrne: The Old Fox Wrongfoots Media Colleagues Again

Down through the years, he has retired more often than Frank Sinatra — in rumour, if not in real life. Indeed, in the past decade it became axiomatic that as each successive RTE season loomed, every newspaper in the land would inevitably speculate on his imminent going and publish a suitably sombre and seriously measured […]

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CHARLIE BIRD / DESPERATE ROMANTICS

RTE1’s new half-hour series, The Big Story, began by promising us that we were about to relive “some of the major scoops that have occurred in the career of Charlie Bird.” This was a pleasure most of us had been eagerly awaiting for years. After all, we had accompanied Charlie on his epic voyage down […]

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