Artistic Differences
The Fab Two: Lennon and McCarney working with and against each other
Lennon was far the more socially privileged of the two. The house he grew up in had a name, ‘Mendips’, not a number, and the remnants of a bell system for calling servants. McCartney, who lived in a rented house and, from age fourteen, in a low-income single-parent household, would go to Mendips anxious to make an impression on Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, who didn't hide the fact that she saw him as a social inferior. It was Lennon himself who decided, somewhat belatedly, that he was working class.
Death in the Valley
Poems of flight, new beginnings, sad partings and rich harvests
Rumpled Giant
The greatest 20th century poet writing in English along with WB Yeats
The Grapes of Mirth
The traditions and development of a very special Spanish wine
Their Story
Nine families of sister siblings who were influential in Irish history
A Surrealist’s Journey
The life and myriad achievements of scientist and artist Desmond Morris
Roots Music
Poems leading from the forest to the book, and the roots of book in forest
Inventing the Republic?
Irish writers and their attitudes to the events of the revolutionary period
The Good Fight
American foreign correspondents at large in an age of optimism
Artistic Differences
The Fab Two: Lennon and McCarney working with and against each other
Getting There
Blueprints for the path to a successful referendum and a united Ireland
When Beauty Lands
The giddy promise and remarkable elegance of tennis genius Roger Federer
Most on-court oppositions are muddy. Nearly all players have a similar style of play. If you take out the extraneous elements, such as a player’s off-court personality or on-court antics, there is often not much contrast left. Then, at a moment when there was increasingly heavy emphasis on honing certain skillsets to the detriment of others and the last embers of elegance seemed to be dying, along came a player who rekindled the sacred fire. Part of Roger Federer’s genius was thus to rescue the baby from the bathwater.
Blogs et cetera
Brian O’Doherty: 1928-2022
They are described by their shadows.
Brian O’Doherty on Edward Hopper
With the death in New York of the Irish-American artist, writer and critic Brian O’Doherty, on November 7th, it can be said of the Irish literary landscape that another oak has fallen. This was the description of the passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013, and Seamus Deane in 2021, the image being particularly appropriate since Doire, the name of both writers’ native county, means an oak grove. The association of trees with knowledge goes back to the Ogham alphabet associated with the Druids in ancient times, and no contemporary artist...
With the death of artist, writer and critic Brian O’Doherty, it can be said that another oak has fallen. This was the description of the passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013, and Seamus Deane in 2021. The association of trees with knowledge goes back to the Ogham alphabet, and no contemporary artist did more to rekindle interest in this abstract system of lettering than Brian O’Doherty, most famously in his Mondrian-like ‘Ogham on Broadway’.