“When she woke, she was Red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign. She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, […]
Dublin is always a great place to visit; it doesn’t matter what time of the year – particularly as, weather-wise at least, it makes precious little difference whether it’s Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter. It’s always going to be a little bit sunny, a little bit rainy, a bit chilly, and certainly very rarely roasting. […]
I remember the first time I saw Nosferatu. I was 15 and in the full throws of gothic angst – complete with importance, poetry and pianos. The dramatic German Expressionist stylings of Murnau’s Carpathian landscape, therefore, offered the ideal genre –especially when it came to an extremely teen-friendly subject…..vampires. Made in 1921 in the extremely […]
‘I think I’m mostly inspired by emotional and existential topics, either my own or people around me’, muses Ane Brun, the Norwegian songstress as she reflects on everything from poetry in politics to racism and fantasy collaborations. Having recorded nine albums since her debut album Spending Time with Morgan in 2002, it’s fair to say that […]
WordPress has mushroomed in size over the last couple of years, and its estimated that 22 in every 100 new domains registered in the States are running wordpress. And it’s not only small bloggers and internet marketers running the software – they claim that 14.7% of the top million websites are using their free open […]
The prize-winning Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria has, apparently, decided to pack in her career writing books after having discovered that more copies of it had been illegally downloaded than had actually been sold. Etxebarria, whose first book was a biography of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and who has won both the Premio Nadal and the […]
I attended the talk one evening last June, upstairs in a second-hand bookshop a short walk from my home. The journalist had reported in the past from Iran and Iraq and was now just back from Libya, the outcome of the war there still uncertain. During the discussion which followed a human rights lawyer who […]
Mervyn Peake’s much-loved cult series was brought to an abrupt and tragic end with the onset of Parkinson’s and Encephalitis. The mantle, however, was to be taken up in Titus Awakes by none other than his wife Maeve Gilmore – quite a surprise given that no one knew of her manuscript until its discovery by […]
In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is […]