Italo Calvino, in his playful late novel (1979) If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, enters in the first chapter (or rather it is “you”, dear reader, who enters) a bookshop, with the settled purpose of buying Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller ‑ hoping perhaps that it might be a bit better…
Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books (July 28th) writes on the difficulty of presenting on stage a convincing library, library in this case meaning not the august municipal public institution, such as Armley Public Library in Leeds where Bennett says he was educated as much as at school, but a private collection of books, “someone’s…
Cynthia L Haven wrote in a recent Times Literary Supplement essay (November 23rd) about the wave of commemorations and celebrations that attended the hundredth anniversary this year of the birth of the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Yet she emphasises the difficulties that many will have in understanding the now largely vanished world of religion and ideology…
The arrival of the department store at the end of the nineteenth century gave birth to a new social actor, the shop girl specialising in sales. Exploitation, of more than one kind, remained, but here was a figure with more pride and independence than the traditionally heavily oppressed grocery employee.
A tradesman’s demand for a fee that seemed exorbitant led ‘The Irish Penny Magazine’ back in 1840 to muse on the relative value of slaves in America and the children of the poor in Ireland.
Peter Sirr prowls the tangled history and contemporary reality of Dublin’s Docklands.
The differing attitudes of Irishmen in the period from 1914 to 1922 and beyond can be seen through a brief history of three men. One of them, Emmet Dalton, served with distinction alongside Michael Collins. He had previously been in the British army, and he wasn’t ashamed of that.
Flora Mitchell’s warm tribute – in words, ink and watercolour – to old Dublin, published in the mid-1960s, records the city at a time when much of it was about to disappear forever, a victim of better economic times and the optimism, and heedlessness of the past, that accompanied them.
Maurice Earls writes: Six hundred copies of Vanishing Dublin by Flora Mitchell were published in 1966 by Allen Figgis. The book offers short descriptions of numerous streets and lanes in Dublin, each illustrated with one of the author’s watercolours. The book, which has never been reprinted, struck a chord with the public and copies, when they do become…
Peter Sirr writes: Cut throat Lane, above a list of churches and directly above the engraved figure of the surveyor and his tripod, as if his view of the city might also be an inspection of its criminal underlife. The city obliges: Murdering Lane. Cutpurse Row. Dirty Lane. Dunghill Lane. Bedlam. Black Dog Prison. The names…