New York – a poem by Tom Brace ‘ Driven by necessity, man can achieve
Elevation in a confined space
And in a place of Babel reach the sky…’
It’s an extremely cold (but not, we insist rainy) day in Dublin and I am sitting down in Hodges Figgis Bookshop on Dawson St. I am not alone. There are a couple of other likely and some unlikely audience candidates dotting the seats which have been set up for tonight’s main event- a talk by […]
I can’t remember learning to talk but I do remember learning to read. As the youngest of four, I had an urgent need to be able to read even before I started school. All around me, my family’s heads were buried in Mills and Boon, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Mickey Spillane, Charles Dickens or the […]
Being a Girl You’ve seen the film: a man looks behind an office filing cabinet to find a portal into another man’s consciousness – someone who turns out to be a famous actor. The intruder remains inside this other life for a quarter of an hour or so before being ejected onto the side of […]
From their shared fascination with Moby-Dick, writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne came together to curate, first, an installation in Plymouth, England, celebrating the book – Dominion: A Whale Symposium. They put together a book with the same title earlier this year then organised and recently launched the Moby-Dick Big Read (www.mobydickbigread.co.uk), a website […]
“In considering who should manage the last days of the decline of an empire, we are paralysed by the thought: If not Barack Obama then Mitt Romney”. William Wall reviews Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion by AK Press
Martin Amis’s 1989 London Fields – or ‘The Murderee’ as it was nearly called – is a virtuoso exercise in black humour, deceit, burlesque and biting misogyny. As Simon Schama put it in 2011: “Martin Amis’ glorious fury, London Fields; the never-likely-to-be-bettered bedtime story from the heart of Mrs Thatcher’s darkest Albion; stained with punk […]
Northern-Irish band Two Door Cinema Club release their new album Beacon on the 3rd of September, and as a preview for fans have started streaming it from sound cloud (we have it below for your pleasure). The 3 piece band from Bangor () are still riding on a wave of success following their debut album, […]
When religion and atheisim collide, at least in the columns of most newspapers and magazines, the arguments usually boil down to the essentials of faith vs reason; to whether religious belief has a place in secular society; to the supposed intolerance of the ‘new atheism’ or to whether atheism is in itself merely a sophisticated […]