Sporting a scar running from his ankle to hip from when he was attacked by a buffalo several years ago, Hon. Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley, scion of Kenya’s Delamare dynasty, sounds like something Evelyn Waugh might have invented while suffering from a particularly nasty hangover. Think of a darker version of Basil Seal. The great-grandfather […]

The 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert was famous for his attention to detail. He was reputed to spend over a week agonizing over a single sentence, weighing up each word’s exact shade of meaning. It seems that Flaubert has some distinguished heirs among the tabard-wearing intellos who occasionally work for Iarnr�d �ireann. Commuter and intercity […]

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, an article by pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink) yokes together the decline of General Motors and the rise of Ireland Inc. The connection is demographics: just as the ratio of active workers to retirees became a major burden on the American behemoth, […]

On Monday Fianna F�il senators and TDs gathered in Westport, Co. Mayo for their annual “think-in.” One suspects that such events are designed as much to send out signals about the party’s intellectual credentials (“You know, we’re not just cute hoors who skull pints in the FF tent at the Galway Races”) as they are […]

Der Spiegel’s English-language website features an article on the latest “taboo-breaking” book on the Third Reich to appear in Germany. The book in question, Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead (apparently the punchline to a joke), deals with the incongruous subject of humour and joke-telling during Hitler’s regime. What is suggestive about the article is […]

Recently, a billboard on the N8 route near the Port Laoise bypass, advertising “Frans Crash Repairs,” was castigated by self-appointed guardians of grammatical purity, the Apostrophe Protection Society. Personally, when it comes to apostrophes I find sins of omission (leaving them out) less offensive than sins of commission (putting them in where they don’t belong). […]

Summer is over, the evenings are drawing in, the roads are again clotted with traffic, and, if you were not sufficiently depressed, the country’s worst journalist is back in the saddle. Yes, Orna Mulcahy surpasses even chick-lit author “Kate” Holmquist and R�is�n Ingle in the production of the most vacuous prose appearing in The Irish […]

Like Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines, like President Bush to New Orleans, like Bertie Ahern to, er, Fagan’s , I have returned. The reasons for my online absence (or should that be “offline presence”?) are varied and prosaic: the demands of a new job and “quality parenting” stand out. Of course, we should not discount […]

In my last post I made an oblique (very oblique, it appears) reference to Vladimir Nabakov’s Pale Fire. Incidentally, Nabakov’s book is listed alongside 1000 others in a book telling us what we should read before we shuffle off this mortal coil.Some eager beaver has provided a list of the books recommended here.Many of the […]

I see that Sinn F�in decided to hold an al fresco recruitment drive today in Dublin.(Actually, they can probably kiss goodbye to increasing their seats in the next election if the memory of this carry-on remains fresh in the voters’ memory.)