Latest Blogs
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.
Man can’t spell diarrhoea …
In the editing game there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get everything in your text just so – as long as you’ve got unlimited time and an endless supply of well-trained staff. But in the real world nine out of ten sometimes ain’t bad.
In a Spanish bookshop
It is surprising perhaps to stumble across a small independent bookshop in a side street, and it can be even more surprising what you will find in it.
A little of what you fancy
Can the observant Muslim take alcohol? The most common answer would be no, yet the ninth century Abassid caliphs so much admired by ISIS couldn’t leave the stuff alone.
Llareggub, trig and trim
Happy St David’s Day, and if you’re expecting to let the sun in, see it wipes its feet first.
Learning the ropes at The Good Companions
England in the late 1960s was full of temptations, what with barmaids, divorcees and lingerie ads in the London Underground. It was the kind of place where anything might happen, though it didn’t.
Ignoring the Voters
It is not difficult to find statistics to back up the view that our parliamentary democracies are not very democratic. But is there any evidence that we would wish to make the effort to invent any other kind?
The state we’re in
British diplomats have been told that they can now call the neighbouring island Ireland. Does that mean that we have to stop calling them the Brits?
Getting Past the Post
Playwright Sir David Hare wonders why British Labour’s leader doesn’t speak out eloquently in favour of socialism and denounce the whole rotten edifice of British capitalism. Perhaps because he doesn’t want his party to lose most of its seats.
A Strong Line in Ireland
The worst that can happen to you on a theatre night out in Dublin is that you will be bored. At the end of the sixteenth century in Elizabethan London you ran the risk of being impressed into the army to die fighting the wild Irish.