maeve brennan

In another life, Maeve Brennan could have been my mother, and in a way I see her as such. Born within two years of each other, they were Dubliners from neighbouring suburbs – my mother from Richmond Hill in Rathmines, Maeve from Cherryfield Avenue, a mile away in Ranelagh. Both of them were thin, petite, […]

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TV Review

Having written last Saturday about the programmes I had most admired in the past twelve months, it was with some degree of interest that I tuned into Ireland’s Top TV Moments, a compilation of what 3e deemed to be the most riveting television occasions of 2010. Puzzlingly, nothing that I had singled out featured in […]

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Francois Truffaut

Ever since I was a teenager and saw Les Quatre Cents Coups in the Fine Arts Cinema Club that used to exist in the basement of Busaras, Francois Truffaut has been one of my heroes. It was in that movie – made 50 years ago this summer, though showing no signs of ageing – that […]

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Pat’s substance will win out over style

THOSE of us who’ve managed to get through our lives without listening to RTE 2fm — certainly not in the evening and hardly ever in the morning, even when Gerry Ryan was in situ — will be bidding adieu to Ryan Tubridy later in the summer when he moves from his 9am Radio 1 slot […]

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The Frontline; Gary Glitter…

Alan O’Brien’s tirade from the audience on last Monday’s edition of The Frontline (RTE1) was an outburst waiting to happen, and I’m only surprised such an expression of fury at the salaries of top broadcasters hadn’t occurred sooner – on Pat Kenny’s morning radio programme, say, or the Marian Finucane Show or Joe Duffy’s Liveline: […]

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Jason Byrne; Baz Ashmawy; Maeve Higgins; Nurse Jackie

Announcing RTE’s autumn and winter schedule a few weeks ago, the station’s new director of programming Steve Carson promised us shows that would “innovate and entertain, inform and initiate,” while his superior Noel Curran vowed that our viewing experience would be enriched by “quality Irish programmes.” Alas, the road to hell is paved with the […]

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Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen, can you believe it, will be 73 this September, more cool now than he’s ever been, with the soul of a poet and the soulfulness of the greatest singers. Just as hard to credit is that it’s almost forty years ago since he recorded his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, from whose […]

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Why I Love Essays

It’s almost ten years since Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, created such a stir – and a well-deserved one at that – among critics and readers. Since then, she’s written other novels (On Beauty, her updating of EM Forster’s Howards End, was especially intriguing) but more and more you’ll find her writing lengthy pieces […]

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Young Irish & Wealthy; Riviera Cocktail

In July last year, just as the country was heading into economic meltdown, RTE chose to rebroadcast a programme it had first screened the previous winter. Presented by Craig Doyle, it was called Ireland’s Top Earners and I wrote at the time that “with spectacular disregard for the sensitivities of the down-trodden public, this 100-minute […]

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American Caesars

Lives of the US Presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to George W Bush. By Nigel Hamilton. Bodley Head Caligula, the vilest of the Caesars, snarled at someone who criticised his actions. “Bear in mind,” he said, “that I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” Almost two thousand years later, in an unguarded aside, George […]

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David Marcus

I have had many editors in a long career in journalism, but it was the Irish Press’s literary editor, David Marcus, who left the most lasting impression on me. Even before joining the paper at the age of 22, I had submitted poems to its New Irish Writing page and David had published some of […]

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TAKING PICTURES. By Anne Enright.

In the introduction to her 1996 Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant had some sound advice for readers. “Stories are not chapters of novels,” she pointed out. “They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” […]

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Gay Byrne: The Old Fox Wrongfoots Media Colleagues Again

Down through the years, he has retired more often than Frank Sinatra — in rumour, if not in real life. Indeed, in the past decade it became axiomatic that as each successive RTE season loomed, every newspaper in the land would inevitably speculate on his imminent going and publish a suitably sombre and seriously measured […]

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CHARLIE BIRD / DESPERATE ROMANTICS

RTE1’s new half-hour series, The Big Story, began by promising us that we were about to relive “some of the major scoops that have occurred in the career of Charlie Bird.” This was a pleasure most of us had been eagerly awaiting for years. After all, we had accompanied Charlie on his epic voyage down […]

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Death of the Novel

The novel is dead. So says American critic Lee Siegel who, writing in a New York newspaper, has dismissed contemporary fiction as “culturally irrelevant.” And his pronouncement has been greeted as worthy of extensive coverage in media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic – “Literary storm as top critic declares death of fiction” being […]

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The Seahorseman; The Silence; The Dirty South; Maradona

I learned a lot from watching The Seahorseman (RTE1). I learned, for instance, that the female seahorse has a penis and that the male is the one who gets pregnant, which presumably means that the male is actually the female, and vice versa, though the filmmakers chose not to enlighten me on that. But I […]

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Book Blurb

“It has interested and excited me more than any novel I have read for a number of years.” That was TS Eliot’s  considered opinion of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and for many years it was used by Penguin as a blurb to their edition of the book. Nowadays, though, book-jacket endorsements by famous […]

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Harper Lee

Much has been made of the fact that Harper Lee never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird, which was first published fifty years ago tomorrow, but she’s not the literary world’s only one-hit wonder. To name just a few of the more famous, there are Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, […]

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A Bloody Friday; Bombings…

On these balmy summer evenings, when God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, there’s nothing that boosts one’s sense of euphoria quite like a a barrage of programmes about bombings. TV3 was first up, with Sunday night’s A Bloody Friday: The Dublin-Monaghan Bombings, RTE continuing the theme on Tuesday with the first […]

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Adverse Criticism

The art of adverse criticism is all but dead, or at least so rare as to be the occasion of news stories. A century ago, George Bernard Shaw regularly railed at the awfulness of  English music and the turgidity of Brahms. In the 1950s , Kenneth Tynan felt free to skewer the pretensions of Beckett […]

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