You Should Be Glad
With the Beatles: a sparkling account of an innocent mania
Not everyone liked the Beatles, even in their heyday. Forced together for a 1964 photo shoot with Muhammad Ali - then Cassius Clay - the atmosphere was anything but relaxed, with the boxer referring to them as ‘little sissies’ and them hitting back with ‘stupid wanker’. The Beatles were awestruck by Elvis but he, according to an official memo, later told the FBI he believed the group ‘laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music’.
At Bates Motel
Grief, addiction, abuse, self-harm, motherhood, breakdown, hilarity
Gimme Shelter
The schemes and stratagems that help the rich stay rich
Hard Power
Thucydides and the pursuit of domination through warfare
Walking the Wild Side
Wintering out in Mayo’s lonely glens and boglands
Witness to War
Peadar O’Donnell walks into Franco’s military revolt
Parents and Newcomers
Poetry and place: the case for transnationalism and translocalism
The Fascist Precursor
Fiume and the ‘poetic dictatorship’ of Gabriele d’Annunzio
The Light Fantastick
Dickens: master of imagination and verbal fancy footwork
A Grand Passion
Nora Barnacle’s life with ‘an envious, proud, lonely, discontented man’
Join the Queue
A fictional exploration of ideas pushed to their logical conclusion
Peeling the Onion
Let us look at Trump – so we don’t have to have him again.
History on the Wing
Irish Catholics under the skin: a master class in journalism
What busy, overstretched, understaffed media organisation today has the resources to extend its investigative focus beyond the primarily middle class issues that interest its readers when editors are demanding copy and directors are demanding profits? The opportunities for what has been described as ‘shoe-leather journalism’, both in Ireland and elsewhere, are visibly shrinking, and this is why it is so gratifying to see them re-emerging ‑ being reinvented almost ‑ in a book which costs little more than a week’s supply of a newspaper and which is a master class in the trade.
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A Classical Education II
Enda O’Doherty writes: Many of us may be aware of the rather disparaging remark Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson – a highly educated scholar himself ‑ made on the extent of the Bard’s classical knowledge: “And though thou hadst small Latine, and less Greeke …” This was often interpreted to mean that Shakespeare had a scant or scrappy education (Latin having been the indispensable foundation of schooling in the Elizabethan age) and it was probably grist to the mill of those misguided folk who thought the plays could not possibly have been written by a person from such...
One episode from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ which has appealed over the centuries to many painters and poets, and which may have a certain topicality, features the tale of Daedalus and Icarus. You probably know the story. Daedalus, a skilled artificer, having done what he came to Crete to do - build a labyrinth - wants to leave. Crete is a lovely island they say, with great scenery and friendly people, but really he would prefer to be somewhere else. But how can he get away, with the strict ban on inessential travel King Minos’s government has imposed?