Arsene Wenger has long been regarded as somewhat of a football enigma. He is a respected manager, who espouses confidence in both himself and his team. He speaks like a child of the enlightenment, an apparent champion of football purity. The eleven players that he sends onto a football pitch, be it at Highbury, the […]
The machine is the single most defining entity of the twentieth century. Its role at the turn of the century was a central one: it was the dawn of the modern age facilitated by the energy and productivity of the machine. The focus of life shifted from the rural to the urban, from day to […]
Born in Derry in 1969, Sean O’Reilly is currently one of the most interesting writers working today, Irish or otherwise. His latest work, Watermark, may be set in contemporary Ireland but it eschews shiny portrayals of the modern city, preferring to focus on the psychological and sexual adversities of a group of characters who seem […]
James Meek‘s third novel, The People’s Act of Love is set in a small town in Siberia in 1919, during the Russian civil war. The characters and drama, though, are far removed from the stock literary gallery of reds and whites. Amongst his drammatis personae are Christian castrates, cannibals and a division of the Czech […]
Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way treats an issue which was virtually airbrushed from Irish history for generations after it happened: the involvement of Ireland in the British Army during the First World War. While school texts record the heroic deeds of the 1916 Rising – the event which ultimately led to the creation of […]
In the last week, the threat posed by Moqtada al-Sadr to the U.S.-led efforts in Iraq resurfaced during a bloody incident that occurred in Baghdad. On September 25, a patrol by U.S. and Iraqi troops in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad ended in violence as the troops engaged in a firefight with militia from al-Sadr’s […]
"Well, it is worth pointing out that joining the EU is a long term process," comments Chris Morris, author of The New Turkey – The quiet revolution on the edge of Europe. Much of Morris’ tenure as BBC correspondent in Turkey [1997-2001] was spent, necessarily, examining the complexities and contradictions that surround Turkey’s proposed membership […]
At least two of the nominees on the Booker Prize longlist were not even reviewed let alone widely available when the roster was announced. Now Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty are getting pre-publication press attention. John Updike offers some mixed praise for the former in the New Yorker, chiding Rushdie […]
Publishers appear to assume that once autumn arrives, people cast aside their Dan Browns and J.K.Rowlings, and endeavour to tackle some serious literature. Ireland’s leading novelist, John McGahern has written “Memoir“, a non-fiction account due out in September of his childhood spent in the fairly grim milieu of the Irish border county, Leitrim, during the […]