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.

Home Literature Page 2

Literature

A Restless Imagination

Frank McGuinness is a writer of openness and adventure. Openness to form: while best known as a playwright, while highly regarded as a poet since the 1990s, he has made forays into other genres, writing short fiction in the early 1980s and publishing two novels in the last decade; openness to varying manner and textures, which can range from tightly focused social realism to fantasy. The list of his stage and film adaptations suggests a keen literary appetite, eager to try anything.

Inventing the Republic? II

As might be expected, the immediate response to the Rising of those that were or would soon become the leading Irish writers was probably as complex as that of the Irish public more generally. If a generalisation might be risked, the letters and other early writings of 1916 suggest a sense of stunned incomprehension, this sooner or later modulating in some cases into a grudging respect for the executed leaders.

Percy at the Wake

The troubadour who mangled ‘Moore’s Melodies’ and inspired Joyce

Joyce’s Eye

Modernism and the influence of ‘cinematicity’ on perception

Observing Proportion

The hyphenated music of Maurice Scully’s shadowy airs

A Cosmopolitan Voice

A selection of from the pages of the prestigious ‘Dublin Review’

Back to the Womb

Manchán Magan’s guided tour through the landscapes of ancient Ireland

On the Precipice

The short but productive life of Joseph Roth, elegist of Habsburg Austria

Murder Most Foul

The achievement of a great entertainer, ‘queen of crime’ Agatha Christie

Roots Music

Poems leading from the forest to the book, and the roots of book in forest