Jun 17, 2010 | Latest
Brian Rowan did a short interview with me across the phone for a story published in yesterday’s Belfast Telegraph. It is a good analytical piece on “Why we have to forgive before we start to forget.” Here it is in full: Saville represents a milestone in dealing with...
May 29, 2010 | Latest
My interview with Julian Putkowski on Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ was broadcast on the World Service of the BBC last Wednesday and is available here until next Wednesday. From the BBC website: “It was written by the military scholar Sun Tzu about 2,500 years ago and still...
May 27, 2010 | Latest
Finished Patricia Craig’s memoir, ‘Asking For Trouble’, the story of her dismissal from St Dominic’s Grammar School in 1959 over her alleged scandalous behaviour with lads in the Donegal gaeltacht, and the repercussions that had on the rest of her life. Patricia, who...
May 2, 2010 | Latest
My order from the Folio Society of their new four-volume edition of sixty of Chekhov’s greatest stories, published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, arrived today. A treasure! Finished ‘Little Man, What Now?’ by Hans Fallada.Discovered a little hardback copy...
Apr 26, 2010 | Latest
Poet Pádraic Fiacc is the subject of next Sunday’s documentary on BBC Radio 4, ‘Lost Voices’, presented by Brian Patten. Pádraic Fiacc was born in Belfast in 1924 and is one of Ireland’s greatest living poets whose writing, says Gerard Dawe, “is haunted by a sense of...
Apr 13, 2010 | Latest
Finished ‘Second Readings’, an excellent anthology of summaries of fifty two great novels by Eileen Battersby, literary critic at the Irish Times. Of course, now I have to add several more novels to my list of books I must read before I die which will take their...
