Latest Blogs
CHEKHOV’S HAMMER
“Behind the door of every happy, satisfied person,” wrote Chekhov in the story “Gooseberries”, “there ought to stand a man with a hammer whose constant knocking would be a reminder that there are unhappy people in the world, and that however happy he may be, life sooner or later will show him its claws and…
MESSING ABOUT WITH RHYME
There was an old man of San Remo Whose verses were sometimes quite lameo. While his middle lines rhymed As their syllables chimed His first and his fifth were the sameo. Frank McNally, in The Irish Times, pays measured tribute to Edward Lear, who was born two hundred years ago today. … in general his limericks…
MOVEABLE TYPE, REMOVEABLE TEXT
“The endless malleability of digital writing,” writes Nicholas Carr in the Wall Street Journal, “promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.” “When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text. Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same. Scribes…
STORMING THE CITADEL
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…
WHEN BOOKS WERE BOOKS
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…
MIŁOSZ IN HEAVEN
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…
Shop Girls, High and Low
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.
The Costs of Technology
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.
Eastward Ho!
Peter Sirr prowls the tangled history and contemporary reality of Dublin’s Docklands.
Men at Arms
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.
Vanishing Dublin II
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.
Vanishing Dublin
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…