Euro 2004 has, at last, begun, and has already thrown up a few surprises. Alex Bellos is the author of Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (Bloomsbury), and for five years, was the South America correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer. Mark Harkin spoke to him about the current football-fest. Since the European Championships […]
Buddhism is probably the trendiest, most acceptable religion in Western society today. While the three biggies from Jerusalem undergo various public relations disasters, this modest, mystical faith from farther East marches into that space in the public consciousness recently vacated by Christianity. Indeed, the average, baptized Catholic or Protestant is more likely to have a […]
Geoffrey Beattie is a Professor at the Department of Psychology in the University of Manchester. A native of north Belfast, he was later educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written a memoir of his life growing up during the Troubles of the 1960s and '70s, called Protestant Boy (Granta). Mark Harkin met Geoffrey during […]
Name All The Animals, Alison Smith's first book, is a memoir of her family's grief in the aftermath of the death of her older brother, Roy. In the main, it details Alison's own sense of loss and her struggle to cope, particularly in the light of the competing pressures of adolescence, but it is also […]
Since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, progress towards normality, stability and self-government in Northern Ireland has, at best, stuttered along. Although the majority of people on the island of Ireland have always supported the idea of a power-sharing arrangement between nationalists and unionists, unionist voters and politicians have been less convinced of its long-term […]
Students of Anglo-Irish literature and Irish history may be interested to learn that their studies could be markedly different were it not for the phenomenon of Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Professor Michael Fitzgerald from the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin has uncovered a link between levels of […]
Well I hope we're not too messianicOr a trifle too satanic…- Monkey Man (Jagger/Richards) People who have seen me under the influence of Let It Bleed – listening to it on my headphones as I walk to work – have said that I look like a man possessed, remote from reality and the presence of […]
This year is the centenary of “Bloomsday” – celebrated in James Joyce’s Ulysses. We ask Senator David Norris – why the fuss? Every year in Dublin on 16 June, people celebrate James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses, by re-enacting the journeys of its central characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. With many participants dressed in Edwardian […]
