Feb 1, 2018 | Features
Apparently, when you hit sixty, every third thought is about death. The actual quote that gives this book its title is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘Every third thought shall be my grave.’ The literary editor Robert McCrum suffered a stroke in 1995 when he was...
Jan 29, 2018 | Features
After putting up on Twitter a link to the harrowing feature in Saturday’s Irish Times about the famine – a review of The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland by Breandán Mac Suibhne – I remembered another excellent book the author edited and...
Jan 27, 2018 | Features
Mary Ward, whose son Peter was shot dead by the UVF in 1966, died yesterday, aged 97. In an interview two years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of Peter’s death, his sister Bell spoke about her mother as “a holy woman” who “never missed Mass and always went to...
Jan 24, 2018 | Features
A North Vietnamese spy, ‘the Captain’, who infiltrates the South’s military and security establishment, is so singularly dedicated to his role that he even ‘flees’ Saigon with his General, government officials and senior military figures, so that he can...
Jan 15, 2018 | Features
Three weeks ago I reviewed a new novel, Gangrene, about a British army undercover soldier in Ireland in the 1990s. Here, the author, Aly Renwick, explains the background to his writing the book. I was born in 1944 towards the end of the Second World War and, from...
