Dec 20, 2009 | Features
Dr Kurt Reuber was a pre-war Lutheran pastor but in 1942 was a Wehrmacht doctor in the 16th Panzer Division, tending the German wounded and dying in his dug-out in the steppe north-west of Stalingrad. Reuber was a gifted artist and to cheer up the wounded he drew a...
Dec 16, 2009 | Latest
19th December. Finished reading ‘Changing Places’ by David Lodge, author of ‘The Art of Fiction’ and ‘The Practice of Writing’. 17th December. Last night was in the Ulster Bank, Donegal Square East, at the launch of the ‘Dictionary of Irish Biography’, a collaborative...
Dec 14, 2009 | Features
Last September I mentioned coming across the name of a Russian writer called Isaac Babel when reading ‘Making An Elephant’ by Graham Swift and wrote a little piece about him. Well, I ordered a book by him from the Falls Road Library which I have just finished, ‘You...
Dec 10, 2009 | Features
My friend Paul Larkin responds to a review by (the late Marxist?) Terry Eagleton who heaps praise on Fintan O’Toole’s recent book, ‘Ship Of Fools – How Stupidity And Corruption Sank The Celtic Tiger’. Paul writes: Anyone, like me, who over the course of an adult...
Dec 6, 2009 | Features
I have just finished Antony Beevor’s ‘Stalingrad’ [1998] and am still disturbed by the descriptions of almost universal cruelty on all sides. World War II cost the Red Army nearly 9 million dead and 18 million wounded. Only 1.8 million prisoners of war returned alive...
