There are few transgressions less forgivable than that of supporting a second football team. If football is a ritual replication of warfare, then adopting a second squad is rightly seen as nothing short of mercenary. Peruse the fan forums on the sites of any of the Irish Eircom league teams’ websites and you’ll see a […]
On the last day of the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party [Feb. 14–25, 1956] of the Soviet Union the doors were closed. Delegates were forbidden from taking notes. There was no stenographer and there was to be no discussion. It was then that Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party, delivered his paper […]
Lydia Davis is a rare talent. A writer whose work is challenging, stimulating, innovative, and, taken at face value, short. Very short – some stories in her collections span no more than two lines. Literature, though, (thankfully) is not judged on word counts, and the depth achieved so compactly by Davis is, no doubt, envied […]
Isabel Allende, the world famous Chilean writer and niece of the deceased Chilean president Salvador Allende, takes it with a sense of humor and a pinch of patience that, despite being one of the main representatives of literature produced in Spanish and a key character in Spanish literary circles, in some countries she is still […]
In early February fans and journalists gathered at the Purcell Room of the Royal Festival Hall in London. The reason? The presence of Carlos Fuentes, famous Mexican writer and one of the main representatives of the Latin-American Boom movement (literary movement dating back to the sixties). The presentation kicked off by mentioning Fuentes’s good friend […]
Censorship is not limited to totalitarian States. It can be a subtle thing, when disconcerting ideas are not banned, but, through various means, marginalised. Dr. Mary Condren’s groundbreaking work The Serpent and the Goddess, a study on women, religion and power in Celtic Ireland, was never placed on an index of banned books, and yet […]
The civilian death toll has risen inexorably for the entire duration of the US-led military presence in Iraq following the initial invasion. That is the grim reality uncovered by ongoing tracking of media reports by the Iraq Body Count project (IBC). Figures released by IBC today [March 9th], updated by statistics for the year 2005 […]
This weekend’s Rzeczpospolita carries an interview with Leszek Balcerowicz, the man who administered economic “shock therapy” to Poland, freeing the market almost overnight in 1990. To some he is a bete noire; for others an economic genius. The interrogation was carried out by Slawomir Popowski and Dariusz Rosiak. Balcerowicz invited the reader to look at […]
I gather there is some concern in America about an “Arab” company taking control of their ports. I don’t see what the fuss is: what difference does the nationality of the shareholders make? The Polish government is also worried about foreign ownership, of banks, in particular. Apologies for the why-oh-why’s but why can’t capitalists accept […]