Sep 13, 2021 | Latest
Ciaran Quinn is the Sinn Féin Representative to North America. Here he reviews Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground by Susan McKay. -oo0oo- Susan McKay’s book is a master class in the art of listening and a damning indictment of the failure of dialogue.* The book...
Sep 5, 2021 | Latest
My German publisher, Elsinor, has just reissued Oscar Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, edited and annotated with a preface by my German translator, Jörg W. Rademacher and an afterword by Michael Szczekalla. The new edition of the book, and the irony of...
Jul 29, 2021 | Latest
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who led Portugal’s ‘Carnation’ Revolution in 1974 died this week at the age of 84, at the Military Hospital in Lisbon. On 25 April 1974 Carvalho who’d been an army officer serving in Portugal’s colonies, fighting the MPLA in Angola and...
Jul 23, 2021 | Latest
My friend and German translator, Jörg Rademacher, sent me two (bilingual) books on refugees and displacement. The Austrian composer Ernst Krenek’s novella, The Three Overcoats of Anton K., influenced by The Trial, is a Kafkaesque nightmare about a trapped man living...
Jul 14, 2021 | Latest
My review of Rachel Kushner’s book of essays, The Hard Crowd, was published in last Saturday’s Arts Section of the Irish Examiner. Here it is: THE title derives from lyrics of a Cream song, White Room: ‘At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd.’ It...
May 13, 2021 | Latest
I stood in front of the gates to his long driveway. The £5m house, inside a two-acre walled garden, was huge for a one-parent family (with no family), but I smirked with satisfaction at the fact that the council had forgotten to take down the sign.* When I was growing...
