When the idea of reviewing Tom Dunne’s memoir was put to me, I hesitated. Years ago, I had resolved not to review books written by friends or close acquaintances. On the whole, despite, some regrets, it made life simpler and the expression of opinion less fraught. Where or how, in any case, did Tom Dunne stand on such scales? Certainly, I used to meet him on occasion in the 1980s and ’90s during my visits to Cork to see my mother and father, then my father only, and some friends. I can’t remember exactly when these occasional meetings with Tom began. The fact that he was a co-editor of The Irish Review, as I was of Graph, was a factor from the mid-’80s on, but these were agenda-less meetings: I simply respected Tom and enjoyed his company and conversation. After my father’s death, soon enough followed by the disappearance of a family base in the city, I was a far less frequent visitor to Cork; our chats, with no falling-out or formal suspension, came to a halt about twenty years ago. So, did I feel like reviewing The Good Boy? (I had yet to read it.) A few other mouse-thoughts were nibbling at some corner of my mind. The book did not seem to be a late episode in the history wars and I didn’t want to be drawn into that over-familiar territory (though I couldn’t help noticing the Eoghan Harris endorsement in the blurb). If revisiting in memory the New Ross of Tom Dunne’s childhood and early education was central to the book, New Ross, where my favourite maternal uncle had lived and taught, was already occupying, more than it...

  Emily Nussbaum  is a Pulitzer-prize-winning writer at The New Yorker magazine who has specialised in TV criticism. Her current book, Cue the Sun, recounts and analyses the invention and growth of ‘Reality’ TV, and the far-reaching implications of that development –– both on and off our TV screens. Her book’s enigmatic title comes from a line in The Truman Show – a movie that Nussbaum credits as being ahead of its time in addressing some of the critical issues raised by the emergence of so many ‘unscripted’ TV series. Nussbaum’s book is exceptionally well-informed and well-written. In several important respects, it casts new light on the history and pre-history of a vital part of TV production. The origins of Reality TV, she argues, pre-date the presence of television in our lives, the true founder of what is now a universal genre being a man called Alan Funt. As a young man, Funt had been employed in the radio department of a New York advertising agency. When he was drafted into the US army in 1943, he was assigned to work in the Forces Radio service that was part of the Army Signal Corps. His job entailed interviewing ordinary GIs about their lives and experiences, but he found that, once the tapes began to roll, they often became inhibited and tongue-tied. Eventually, he found a way round this problem – by using hidden microphones so that the soldiers did not know when they were being recorded, leading to much more open, truthful and revealing interviews. After the war, Funt worked for a local radio station and began to use hidden microphones to record people in everyday situations – often choosing those...

Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute, by Nicholas Fox Weber, Alfred A Knopf, 639 pp, £33, ISBN: 978-0307961594 ‘Van Gogh and Gauguin were having an argument about whether physical pain was worse than spiritual pain,’ explained Mondrian. ‘Van Gogh said physical pain was nothing. And to prove it, then and there, he cut off his ear. I’d have done the same. When I was young, I was just as stubborn.’   DIAGONAL, from Greek diagōnios (‘from angle to angle’) Was the way he’d cut that thing some kind of retort, a provocation? Or with a new friend on the way to take his picture and in so doing fix his image for a century, had nerves got the better as his hand snipped away at the mirror? About the moustache he had on him, in 1926, when André Kertész called into his studio in Paris, for me the curious thing is not how little time would have to pass before its style became synonymous with Hitler; nor is it the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, whose films he may or may not have seen. About Piet Mondrian’s moustache, in 1926, for me the curious thing is its shape. A far cry from the ‘perfectly squared thick black dash’ he had worn since 1922, according to this new biography by Nicholas Fox Weber, that thing beneath his nose does little to establish that ‘even the human head could be a vehicle for ruler-straight lines’. When the fifty-five-year-old abstractionist stared into the camera in 1926, that ‘squared’ tuft of hair was, at best, squarish. The briefest look reveals a baseline far lower on its right than on its left, with the...