Michael jackson; Hector at Ballydoyle…

At Tuesday’s memorial concert for Michael Jackson, Motown founder Berry Gordy described his former employee as “the greatest entertainer that ever lived,” a judgment clearly endorsed by all those television channels which opted to jettison normal programming in order to accommodate live coverage of this funereal love-in to a dead singer. If you grew tired […]

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ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS by Irene Nemirovsky

Here is another masterpiece by Irene Nemirovsky, the Jewish emigre from St Petersburg who fled to France with her family in 1919 and became a bestselling novelist there until her capture by the Germans in 1942 and her subsequent death in Auschwitz at the age of thirty-eight. Her posthumous fame is largely due to the […]

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Brian Friel

Brian Friel’s distinguished playwriting career over five decades has been notable for its range and diversity. His concerns have encompassed the history and politics of Ireland, as well as its social and religious divides, and these have been memorably addressed in such plays as The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, Translations and Making History. Yet […]

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Boy and Man. By Niall Williams.

Niall Williams’s novels have a considerable readership, both here and abroad, and it’s not hard to see why. Since the publication of Four Letters of Love 1n 1997 he’s been offering a view of life that puts great stock in chance, coincidence, yearning and questing as ways of leading to personal fulfilment and spiritual redemption. […]

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1968 Miscellany

I was in UCD in May 1968 but I was no college radical. For one thing, I was far too busy belatedly cramming for my finals in English language and literature to bother my barney about the state of the world or the nation or even the academic injustices that were so exercising my fellow […]

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Leaving Ardglass. By William King.

Leaving Ardglass is the very dull title of a very good book, one of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time. I hadn’t heard of its author before and on learning that he is a parish priest in Drumcondra I feared that this story of a young Kerryman who […]

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Leaving Ardglass

By William King. The Lilliput Press. €12.99 Leaving Ardglass is the very dull title of a very good book, one of the best novels to have come out of Ireland in a long time. I hadn’t heard of its author before and on learning that he is a parish priest in Drumcondra I feared that […]

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GREENE’S BOOKSHOP

The first genuine books I ever read – not The Secret Seven, not Biggles Sweeps the Desert, not even The Wind in the Willows, but real books with adult thoughts and feelings – came courtesy of Rathmines public library, where I spent too many evenings of my teenage years. Yet even though a library is […]

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Brian Friel

Brian Friel’s distinguished playwriting career over five decades has been notable for its range and diversity. His concerns have encompassed the history and politics of Ireland, as well as its social and religious divides, and these have been memorably addressed in such plays as The Freedom of the City, Aristocrats, Translations and Making History. Yet […]

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Tribute to doomed flight beset by heavy baggage

On the Saturday before the November 1984 Beaujolais air crash I met Evening Herald editor Niall Hanley at a rugby international in Lansdowne Road. As a journalist with the Evening Press, I had been belatedly invited on the plane trip, which was scheduled for the following Tuesday, but hadn’t confirmed my acceptance.

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Kenneth Grahame

Mention the name of Kenneth Grahame to most people and, if they recognise it at all, they’ll think of The Wind in the Willows, which was published a hundred years ago this summer. And a lovely book it is, too, one of the most imaginative and enduring of children’s fantasies in the English language. Grahame, […]

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Paris

Although the great Irish short story writer Maeve Brennan lived for most of her adult life in Manhattan, only a small section of it seemed like home to her. Writing of her alter ego, The Long-Winded Lady, she confessed that large areas of the city were “a blank to her. She knows next to nothing […]

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John McGahern

You can’t go home again, the American writer Thomas Wolfe declared in the title of one of his most famous books. John McGahern would not have agreed. After years spent in Dublin, London and further afield, he returned three decades ago to the countryside of his birth and remained there until his untimely death yesterday. […]

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Bloomsday 1904 – 2004

On the centenary of literature’s most famous day, why we should still rejoice (and read Joyce) Today marks the centenary of a man who never existed, or at least who never existed outside the imagination of a writer and his readers. Yet this non-existent man is perhaps more real to a lot of those readers […]

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Filed Under Small Screen Star

James Garner is the sole actor to be included in David Thomson’s magisterial New Biographical Dictionary of Film on the strength of a television role.

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Heytesbury Lane

Waking at night I hear a pig squeal. My room is low-ceilinged with half-moon windows. Outside the front door there is a courtyard. On summer mornings I can trap the sun. Sometimes at night, though, I wake to hear the pitiable scream of a trapped pig. It is difficult to believe I am not having […]

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The life of Reilly

My father, who was almost forty-one when he married my mother, tells me now that the happiest days he ever spent were in a boarding house on Gardiner Street. His present room looks out on a familiar view, those Dublin mountains he made us climb when Sunday afternons meant scenic spins in a cramped Ford […]

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That September

With a shock I realise I’m in the picture, too. It is afternoon in the Zoological Gardens and you are seated on an iron bench, beside a woman who peers primly at the camera; behind stands a stern-faced man in a bow-tie, and next to him my father. You are wearing a pleated skirt and […]

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Helvick Head, 4 May

(for Joe Kennedy) Out there, on that rock licked by the waves, life is pampering itself: a solitary cormorant spreads his great wings to embrace the heat; nearby, six guillemots, stunned by the sun, preen like a foreign legion waiting to be inspected. These creatures are wiser than we are, who have spent all afternoon […]

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The death of the moth

Margaret found you at the side of the house in a tray full of rain. You were too exhausted to flutter free, so she brought you in and put you carefully on the window sill, to recover your strength. But you didn’t. The next morning we went to remove your corpse and found behind you […]

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