We all make mistakes. Lord knows, I do (having noticed this morning that I spelt the surname of the man who I sort-of-hope will be the next Taoiseach as “Kenney”!). But in this “knowledge economy” there’s now money to be made, and lots of it, from slips at the keyboard. Take the rather noisome figure […]
With the media moratorium on election coverage due to fall like a sheet over a disfigured corpse, it is time to reflect, even if it sets your teeth on edge, on the campaigns that are rapidly winding down. Alas, it was far from an electrifying spectacle. If the politics of ideology is a thing of […]
A leading Italian current affairs programme has opted to buy the BBC documentary ‘Sex Crimes and the Vatican’ to be transmitted this Thursday along with a studio debate. In most of the free world controversy comes after the broadcast of sensitive programmes like this. When toes have been trod upon, one can expect a reaction. […]
The American author Richard Ford is scheduled to give a reading at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre on June 6. I’m currently immersed in his latest novel, The Lay of the Land, a real baggy monster whose narrative leisurely meanders, with plenty of oxbow digressions, through the fertile mind of Frank Bascombe, the realtor familiar to readers […]
As chancellor it was his [Thomas More’s] duty to enforce the laws against heretics […] As he himself wrote in his “Apologia” (cap. 49) it was the vices of heretics that he hated, not their persons; and he never proceeded to extremities until he had made every effort to get those brought before him to […]
In the week that Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset announced a take over of Dutch programming giant Endemol, as if by coincidence, Romano Prodi’s government are starting to chart the waters for a new law on conflicts of interest. Good luck to them. There is, perhaps, no other country in the EU that needs such a law […]
It’s been reported that J.K. Rowling has now pledged a “staggering” sum to the reward for the safe return of Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old English girl who was abducted in Portugal 12 days ago.This sum is in addition to the $3 million already raised, in part due to contributions from such notoriously media-shy figures as […]
I don’t have the heart to explain all the “lustration” shenanigans in Poland so I will just throw out a few comments for those who have been following it, but perhaps not that closely, and perhaps relying on English language sources. Unsurprisingly, the lustration law was found to be largely unconstitutional on Friday by the […]
You’re likely to relish Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to The End, if you enjoy narratives that revoice the 19th century’s omniscient narrator as a sardonic first-person-plural Greek chorus in the style of The Virgin Suicides.Even if you don’t fall into that audience category, anyone who’s ever worked in an office “environment” […]