Craig Doyle; Sean Scully; Joanna Lumley

Where would we be without RTE to cater for our every need and to serve our deepest longings? Recognising, for instance, that one weekend chat show wouldn’t be sufficient to slake our thirst for interviews with C-list celebs, our national broadcaster decided last January to follow up Friday night’s Late Late Show with a Saturday […]

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Gavin Friday; A Touch of Frost…

About halfway through the Arts Lives film, Ladies and Gentlemen, Gavin Friday (RTE1), former Virgin Prunes member Guggi spoke of his departure from the avant garde Dublin band in the mid-1980s. “After I left they were shit,” he said. In truth, for those of us who experienced them at the time and whose tolerance didn’t […]

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The South Bank Show: The final cut by Melvyn Bragg

ITV’s flagship arts programme, The South Bank Show, has just begun a new series — its very last, as it happens. After 32 years in existence, it was effectively axed last summer when its creator, the novelist and cultural apostle Melvyn Bragg, felt unable to comply with the stringent budgetary cuts demanded of him by […]

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THE HUMBLING By Philip Roth

Age, illness, loneliness and the troubling persistence of male sexual desire – these have been the preoccupations of Philip Roth throughout the past decade and they remain so in this 140-page novella by the now 76-year-old author. But while there’s been a defiant and eloquent grandeur to some of his recent fiction, which has raged […]

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Haunted by this ghost of a drama

‘I realise I’m a little overwhelming,” Nicholas admitted to Lena about a third of the way into The Eclipse, RTE’s much-trumpeted St Patrick’s night drama, co-written by Billy Roche and Conor McPherson from a story by the former and directed by the latter. Overwhelming was one way of putting it — he could also have […]

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THE ECLIPSE/HORSES/REQUIEM FOR DETROIT/COUGAR TOWN

“I realise I’m a little overwhelming,” Nicholas admitted to Lena about a third of the way into The Eclipse, RTE’s much-trumpeted St Patrick’s night drama, co-written by Billy Roche and Conor McPherson from a story by the former and directed by the latter. Overwhelming was one way of putting it – he could also have […]

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HOW TO LIVE: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. By Sarah Bakewell.

The title suggests that you’re about to read a self-help book, and in a way that’s what Sarah Bakewell provides for this age of diaries, blogs, memoirs and endless self-analysis – an age, as she says, that’s “full of people who are full of themselves, fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention.” Mindful […]

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Solar by Ian McEwan

What is it about Ian McEwan that has elevated him to the status of “Greatest Contemporary English Novelist?” “He is this country’s unrivalled literary giant,” according to the books critic of the London Independent.

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SOLAR. By Ian McEwan.

What is it about Ian McEwan that has elevated him to the status of Greatest Contemporary English Novelist? “He is this country’s unrivalled literary giant,” according to the books critic of the Independent in London. “The supreme novelist of his generation,” the  Sunday Times has called him, while the Guardian deems him “our de facto […]

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Famous, Rich & Jobless; Retail Therapy…

Prime Time and The Front Line are always fretting about unemployment, but who needs their dry analyses and numbing statistics when instead you could be watching celebrity gardener Diarmuid Gavin scrounging for a living? That, at any rate, was the premise of Famous, Rich and Jobless (BBC1), which invited four celebs to abandon their customary […]

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God save the heathens from our pious zeal

In these bad days for the Catholic Church in Ireland, RTE1 offers us the two-part On God’s Mission, which allows those who so desire to wallow in memories of a time when we had more priests than the country needed and so dispatched them to the far corners of the globe where “they brought their faith, education, medicine and humanitarian aid to millions”. That, at any rate, is how narrator Barry McGovern described their influence; a view also espoused by President McAleese, who warmly regarded Irish missionaries as “our primary ambassadors — we were judged by them”.

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GERRY ADAMS / THE MEANING OF LIFE

Two weeks ago, on RTE1’s The Meaning of Life, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern paid homage to a deity who forgave and forgot earthly transgressions and who had no problem with such footling matters as extra-marital relationships. That wasn’t the God familiar to me from the same kind of upbringing and education that Bertie experienced, but […]

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THE LIFE OF IRENE NEMIROVSKY by Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Leonhardt.

Prior to his arrest by the French authorities in 1942 and his subsequent murder by the Nazis, Michael Epstein left a piece of luggage with his two small daughters. “Never part from this suitcase,” he told them, “it contains your mother’s manuscript.” Their mother had already been deported to Auschwitz, where she died within a […]

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Charlie Bird & George Lee

Last Monday week Charlie Bird told an uncaring nation that he was quitting his job as RTE’s Washington correspondent. Seven days later George Lee caused somewhat more of a stir when he announced that he was resigning from his nine-month-old post as a Fine Gael TD. Such is Bird’s inflated notion of himself that he […]

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The Best of Frank O’Connor edited by Julian Barnes

In an essay published five years ago, Julian Barnes observed that since Frank O’Connor’s death in 1966 “a respectful forgetting has settled over him,” and it’s true that in the last four decades his books have not been much read or his name often evoked  – this despite the fact that in his lifetime he […]

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CHARLIE BIRD’S AMERICAN YEAR

At the outset of Charlie Bird’s American Year (RTE1), Barack Obama was being inaugurated as US president, and our intrepid Washington correspondent was wondering what lay ahead for the man. “This time next year,” he mused, “where will the journey have taken him? Who knows? And who knows where the journey will have taken me?” […]

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Patrick Hamilton

No one in literature has written with such dark intensity and sardonic humour  about the pleasures and  perils of pub life as Patrick Hamilton – and he wasn’t even Irish. Instead, his luckless characters inhabit the bars around Earls Court and the Edgeware Road. Occasionally they’re to be found nursing a pint or a whiskey […]

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Frank McCourt

I first met Frank McCourt in November 1996. It was just before the publication of Angela’s Ashes on this side of the Atlantic, and his name was unknown to me, as it was then to most Irish people – including the late and much lamented Limerick Labour party TD Jim Kemmy. It was Jim who […]

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Orange Prize Sexism

Window and floor displays in most bookshops are almost invariably a sea of pink, peach and yellow covers – thereby signifying the latest chick lit titles and thus denoting women writers. On the other end of the literary spectrum, women have been snaffling up most of the prestigious awards – Hilary Mantel winning the Man […]

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RTE rates quantity over quality with spring schedule

IN a press release announcing its spring schedule, and with January not yet gone, RTE declares itself delighted by what it has already been offering us this year, starting with ‘The School’, a series which apparently has been “critically acclaimed”.

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