Clive James

In the early 1980s, after a decade as Britain’s funniest and sharpest television reviewer, Clive James became an active participant in the medium that had so excercised his marvellous critical faculties. In doing so, as he relates in this fifth volume of his memoirs, he found himself inhabiting “the strange world where everybody knows your […]

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INHERENT VICE by Thomas Pynchon

Here’s a first – a Thomas Pynchon novel that you can actually read and understand. In his 73rd year, the reclusive author who has furrowed the collective brow of generations of literary students with his dense, complex and often baffling fiction has finally come up with a genial and almost entirely comprehensible shaggy dog story […]

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THE REVOLT OF THE PENDULUM: Essays 2005-2008. By Clive James.

Clive James is the finest living essayist and many of us have long admired both his supple prose and the bracing wit that enhances rather than  undermines his essential and humane seriousness on subjects as diverse as artistic excellence, popular culture, the perils of celebrity and the evils perpetuated by political ideologies. No one, however, […]

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Questions & Answers; Lemass…

For a television critic, Questions and Answers, which ended its 23-year run this week, was that weird combination of the unmissable and the frequently unwatchable. It was unmissable because, as RTE television’s main forum for political and social debate, it always offered the possibility of controversy. And it was often unwatchable because the politicians who […]

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THE REVOLT OF THE PENDULUM: Essays 2005-2008.

By Clive James. Picador, £15.99 sterling Clive James is the finest living essayist and many of us have long admired both his supple prose and the bracing wit that enhances rather than  undermines his essential and humane seriousness on subjects as diverse as artistic excellence, popular culture, the perils of celebrity and the evils perpetuated […]

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Two Books by Maeve Brennan

THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION. By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 THE LONG-WINDED LADY. By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 When Maeve Brennan’s stories of suburban Dublin life were posthumously published in The Springs of Affection twelve years ago, they were greeted with acclaim, and rightly so – here were 21 masterpieces which few had known about unless […]

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THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION and THE LONG-WINDED LADY

By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 When Maeve Brennan’s stories of suburban Dublin life were posthumously published in The Springs of Affection twelve years ago, they were greeted with acclaim, and rightly so – here were 21 masterpieces which few had known about unless they’d been faithful readers of the New Yorker or had been fortunate […]

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Prime Time Investigates; Rugby Lions…

When it’s not shamelessly stealing lifestyle and reality formats from abroad, RTE loves nothing better than to indulge in easy outrage, and usually belated easy outrage at that – lurid retellings of stories that have already been in the headlines, accompanied by oodles of tut-tutting and overheated editorialising. I’m not really thinking of the long-running […]

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TWINK

Despite the promise of its title, there’s nothing remotely amusing about the current RTE1 series A Little Bit Funny, in which various over-exposed comedians are given free rein to tell viewers how great they are. First up was Twink, a woman whose thirst for self-publicity far exceeds her pantomime talents, while this week it was […]

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REVOLUTION IN THE AIR: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Vol.1: 1957-73.

By Clinton Heylin. Constable, £20.00 sterling. Bob Dylan has always attracted extreme admirers, but among the goodly number of daft books written about him none was dafter than Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004), in which eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks chose to regard the songs as lyrics on a page, divorced both from their melodies […]

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Seamus Heaney; Single Handed; Secret of the Stones

Much as some of us cherish the poetry of Seamus Heaney, RTE’s celebration of his 70th birthday seemed just a teensy bit over the top. As someone who contributed his own tuppence worth to the occasion in this newspaper, I still couldn’t credit that the people in charge of RTE radio set aside one hour […]

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Brides of Franc; Designs for life…

Someone should tell RTE that the party’s over. While the rest of us are wondering where our next meal or pay cheque is coming from, our national broadcaster blithely commissions a new series of Brides of Franc (RTE1), in which a preening wedding planner encourages his clients to embrace ostentatious opulence. In his pursuit of […]

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Seamus Heaney at Seventy

Despite his tousled mass of silver hair, it registers as a small shock that Seamus Heaney is now seventy – despite his status as grand old man of Irish poetry, it’s his infectiously boyish openness to both life and literature that has always distinguished him from his peers. Yet grand old man he is and […]

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HOW WE BLEW THE BOOM WITH GEORGE LEE

This week, an international survey revealed that, of 19 countries polled, the Irish had by far the gloomiest view of the current economic crisis – and right on cue along came RTE’s George Lee to tell us that the country’s banjaxed. George, of course, has been droning on about this for years and though he […]

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Hugh Leonard Obituary

Hugh Leonard was a notable dramatist and a very successful television scriptwriter, but he always saw himself as an outsider among his peers and was quick to take offence at perceived slights from critics or fellow playwrights. Indeed, in his long-running Sunday Independent column (and before that in Hibernia magazine), he was adept both at […]

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HAVE YOU SEEN…?

A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. By David Thomson. If you love good prose, provocative insights and witty putdowns and have even a passing interest in the movies, this is the year’s most engaging book. Thomson is an Englishman who moved to the West Coast of America in the 1970s, from where he has been […]

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Buddy Holly – Sunday Miscellany

Like Don McLean, I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride, but I do recall that my sister was inconsolable when news of Buddy Holly’s death came through on the wireless. That was only to be expected, as Buddy Holly was Mary’s first hero. Being younger and belonging to a […]

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Colum McCann wins National Book Award in the US

On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe – if we’re Francophiles – the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]

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CHARLIE BIRD’S ARCTIC JOURNEY

So the first stage of an incredible, awe-inspiring adventure is now fulfilled – an adventure that has led one man from humble beginnings and years of sefless service on behalf of his community to the pinnacle of the world and all the challenges that represents. No, I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s inauguration as US […]

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Blood of the Irish; Christianity…

Ninety minutes into Blood of the Irish (RTE1), a two-part investigation into how our ancestors got here, presenter Diarmuid Gavin sat in an ocean-tossed  currach and was suddenly convinced that these early migrants must have “come by boat.” This was probably news to anyone who’d assumed that they’d arrived on a Ryanair flight, but to […]

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