Latest Blogs
Labour’s Scottish Woes
This week’s UK election is one of the most uncertain for decades. But one thing is sure: Labour will do disastrously in Scotland. And the likelihood is that that situation will persist until such time as the Scottish party can effectively assert its independence from the English one.
Cheap and Cheerful
George Orwell thought that paperbacks were a good idea, particularly for the reader. But he also thought publishers and booksellers should combine to suppress them.
Trollope and Ireland: A Talk
John McCourt, Joycean scholar and chronicler of the Trieste years, will be talking about Anthony Trollope’s Irish novels in Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street on Sunday, April 19th.
Eduardo Galeano: 1940-2015
The Uruguayan writer, journalist and political essayist, who had died aged 74, was an inspirational figure for generations of the Latin American left.
Günter Grass: 1927-2015
The Nobel prizewinner was the best-known German writer internationally and a major figure in both literature and political controversy over half a century.
All the same we’re different
A minister recently suggested that Polish immigrants might be losing out on the possibility of social integration by attending their own schools on Saturdays. But surely if they don’t they will be losing out too.
Recession and Suicide
The causes of a spike in suicides and self-harm have been traced to financial insecurity and other effects of the recession, yet the response is to treat it as a result of staffing problems in the health service.
Wiping the slate
The desire to obliterate the useless past can be found in various forms, from smashing ‘superstitious’ statues and images to wishing to ban ‘fairy tales’ from the classroom.
Money, managerialism and the university
Prof Thomas Docherty, a leading critic of the managerialist threat to the traditional idea and role of the university, is to give a talk at Maynooth University on March 25th.
Irish Times Poetry Now award
Theo Dorgan has been awarded the Irish Times Poetry Now award for his most recent collection, ‘Nine Bright Shiners’.
Prizes at Leipzig
Germany’s second biggest book fair, at Leipzig, is oriented towards the reading public rather than the trade. Over the last week it attracted 186,000 visitors, a record.
Write Badly And Influence People
What is the purpose of ‘jargon’? Is it simply to bamboozle us and disguise the nature, or absence, of the message? Or do difficult concepts sometimes need difficult words? A bit of both perhaps.