Jan 13, 2018 | Features
Tomorrow is the centenary of the birth of Dimitrios Tsafendas whose name probably means little to most people. But from first hearing and reading about him two decades ago I felt his story to be incredibly sad. When Dimitri was a young boy in Mozambique (he was born...
Jan 11, 2018 | Features
For Christmas, my old friend Tom Hartley gave me an old copy of an old book written in 1919, Ireland A Nation by Robert Lynd, who was born into a Presbyterian household in 1879. In my book All The Dead Voices I devote a chapter to Lynd who was buried in Belfast’s City...
Jan 10, 2018 | Features
This is about Brian Palm, Stano and Rudi, so stick with the route, however circuitous! A few months ago I finished writing my play Inmates about characters in an old people’s home, present-day Ireland. The play grew out of the final chapters of my novel Rudi and I...
Jan 3, 2018 | Features
It was James Baldwin who wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This fascinating little book has emerged from Raoul Peck’s eponymous 2016 film based on texts by Baldwin, including thirty pages of letters,...
Jan 2, 2018 | Features
When Soviet troops invaded Germany and overthrew Hitler in 1945, Germans, particularly those in Berlin, knew there would be a reckoning for the death, suffering and pillage their army had inflicted on Russia and the people of the east. Exultant in victory, and usually...
