May 9, 2015 | Features
What a brilliant war memoir for its searing honesty in depicting the “ineptitude and cowardice” of senior commanders; the chaos and confusion on all sides (American gunners accidentally shooting down three Spitfires); the debauchery and cruelty of Allied soldiers (the...
Apr 28, 2015 | Features
Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man from Baltimore, Maryland, died from a severe spinal injury he suffered in police custody. Yesterday, after his funeral, serious rioting broke out and Maryland’s governor activated the National Guard and imposed a curfew. Gray’s...
Apr 25, 2015 | Latest
Finished a wonderful, charming little novel from 1943, The Human Comedy by William Saroyan. Saroyan, the son of an Armenian immigrant, made his initial impact during the Great Depression with “a deluge of brash, original, and irreverent stories celebrating the joy of...
Apr 24, 2015 | Features
Today, Armenia commemorates the 100th anniversary of what historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century when around 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman forces between 1915 and 1917. In 2001, I wrote a feature about the beginning of the...
Apr 20, 2015 | Features
The journalist Brian Rowan has reviewed West Belfast on Eamonn Mallie’s website. Here is the feature in full. The re-written and re-worked novel West Belfast is a story about how the ordinariness, the kindness and the innocence of this place became shattered....
