I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

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Literary Life

The Devouring Mind

Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, by Robert Boyers, Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press, 256 pp, $24.95, ISBN: 978-1942134886 Many critics – and critics are my subject here – spend their lives adding tile after tile to the mosaic of a False Self. A university degree, a glittering essay, an […]

Flashes of Gold

Memories of bohemian Dublin, the Grand Canal and ‘Baggotonia’

Cancelling Mailer

Norman Mailer meets the ‘fierce ladies’ and irretrievably loses the plot

German Lessons

Enda O’Doherty writes: Up to his death at the age of ninety-three in 2013, Marcel Reich-Ranicki had long been the most influential literary critic in Germany and the German-speaking lands (Sprachraum). Through his contributions to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and later Der Spiegel, Reich-Ranicki provided his readers with authoritative judgments on what, in German […]

Getting Known

A memoir of Patrick Kavanagh, the reflections of Thomas McCarthy

Boss Cupid

The warm, human despatches of a gay poet from Reagan’s America

A Vanished Bohemia

A compelling memoir of Aidan Higgins and a mode of literary life now gone

Haunted Houses

Elizabeth Bowen’s love letters recall her first extramarital affair

Once Upon A Time

Marina Warner’s reimagining of a near magical transformation

The Sly Masquerade

For quality of output, for growth and longevity, for the honesty and intensity of his narrative voices and for the relentless quest for forms that would make sense of his and his country’s experience,