May 2, 2010 | Latest
My order from the Folio Society of their new four-volume edition of sixty of Chekhov’s greatest stories, published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, arrived today. A treasure! Finished ‘Little Man, What Now?’ by Hans Fallada.Discovered a little hardback copy...
Apr 26, 2010 | Latest
Poet Pádraic Fiacc is the subject of next Sunday’s documentary on BBC Radio 4, ‘Lost Voices’, presented by Brian Patten. Pádraic Fiacc was born in Belfast in 1924 and is one of Ireland’s greatest living poets whose writing, says Gerard Dawe, “is haunted by a sense of...
Apr 23, 2010 | Features
Antony Beevor has a knack of making history really accessible. Before I came to his books, I had read serious and light literature about the French and Russian revolutions, the First World War and the Vietnam War, etc. I have also interviewed protagonists (for...
Apr 13, 2010 | Latest
Finished ‘Second Readings’, an excellent anthology of summaries of fifty two great novels by Eileen Battersby, literary critic at the Irish Times. Of course, now I have to add several more novels to my list of books I must read before I die which will take their...
Mar 17, 2010 | Features
The Paris Review was first issued in 1953 – as it happens, the year that I was born! I received the four-volume set for Christmas and these quotes are from Volume I. Introduction by Philip Gourevitch: “the interview as a genre of literature unto itself is a distinctly...
