May 26, 2013 | Features
‘Oh my God! ’E looks like a toad!’ were the first words said by Brian Blessed’s mother just after she had given birth. ‘’E looks as if ’e’s been in the ring with Joe Louis!’ I have always admired Brian Blessed from his earliest days in ‘Z Cars’ in 1962 which I watched...
Apr 18, 2013 | Features
Being expelled from St Dominic’s Grammar in 1959 over an innocent adolescent ‘carrying-on’ with some boys that summer in the Donegal Gaeltacht, undoubtedly had a profound effect on 16-year-old Patricia Craig from St James’, off the Falls Road. Her ‘co-accused’, so to...
Apr 16, 2013 | Features
Today, for some reason, I am remembering an old friend whose death I learnt about three years after it occurred, not that I would have been able anyway to have attended his funeral, seeing that I was in jail. James Nolan is now dead twenty years. I first referred to...
Apr 9, 2013 | Features
Wrote a feature on the death of Margaret Thatcher which was published in today’s ‘Irish Examiner’. WHEN Mark Thatcher went missing in the Sahara while taking part in an international motor race in Jan 1982, his ashen-faced mother, upset and...
Mar 29, 2013 | Features
Fifteen years ago I covered for The Guardian and the Irish Examiner the negotiations which led to the signing on Good Friday of the Belfast Agreement. This is the feature I wrote (though slightly amended in The Guardian). Letitia Fitzpatrick from Ulster Television...
Mar 20, 2013 | Features
Dr Jörg Rademacher, the German translator of my novels, wrote a critical feature on Oscar Wilde as a follow-up to his 2011 translation of ‘Dorian Gray’ – ‘Das Bildinis des Dorian Gray’, published by Elsinor in Germany in 2012. This feature, now in English, can be read...
