Dec 29, 2017 | Features
Today in 1989 playwright Václav Havel became President of Czechoslovakia. Two years later, in June 1991, I write about him in a letter to my partner which appears in my book, Then The Walls Came Down: 29 June 1991 I read a review of Open Letters by Vaclav Havel, the...
Dec 27, 2017 | Features
A British intelligence officer, Ginge, is lying in hospital in England after just about surviving a booby-trap bomb which exploded under his car outside his cottage near the former coal-mining village of Bloodworth. It is 1994, just months before the IRA ceasefire...
Dec 20, 2017 | Features
I saw on Twitter today for the first time the testimony of a clearly traumatised and disturbed Israeli soldier, Ido Gal Razon, who killed over forty Palestinians in Gaza. It can be seen here Shortly, I’ll be reviewing a novel by a former British soldier Aly...
Dec 11, 2017 | Features
Alain de Botton can be a very witty and thought-provoking writer, especially the way he weaves philosophical thought into his books. Essays in Love (1993) was his first novel, written when he was just twenty-three, and it is hilarious from a mildly sadistic point of...
Dec 6, 2017 | Features
It’s funny how you come across things. Back in 2006 I spoke at a Writing on the Wall event in Liverpool and over breakfast the next morning I had a conversation with writer Clive Hopwood. Clive has written almost one hundred books for children and has had twenty plays...
Dec 4, 2017 | Features
For thirty years, and before the exponential rise of social media, most Irish republicans relied upon An Phoblacht for uncensored news and for information about the conflict and republican politics. Now An Phoblacht itself, the print edition of which went monthly...
