Blogs

I used to read Séamas O’Reilly’s whimsical weekly column in The Observer . I didn’t know much about him, other than he was Irish. His 2021 memoir, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? won biography of the year in the Irish book awards. He makes light work of his mum dying when he was five. It’s in the title. His incomprehension about why so many people were pouring into his house to see his mum and dad. Mum died from breast cancer when she was forty-three...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In December 1913, I was in El Paso covering the border for a wire service. The Mexican Revolution was in its third year. Pancho Villa had taken Ciudad Juárez. The streets of El Paso were full of journalists, arms dealers, refugees, and men whose occupations fell somewhere between all three. It was the kind of assignment where the story changed every hour and the correspondents drank every night,...

Happy birthday Jacques! Min dae! Few days! V

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZw0bW4Pvzw Pamela Doherty had a baby when she was sixteen. The kind of mother Prime Minister David Cameron warned us about. The kind of mother that was fodder for The Jeremy Kyle Show and for the Tory boo-boys. Ironically, this was the kind of crap loved by the working class as just a bit of harmless fun. Most of us remember Paige Doherty going missing, because she was one of us. We know the shop she was killed...

I am very pleased to announce the publication of 'For All We Know We Don't' - a collection of short stories by our very own Sean McNulty. It's available to order from Amazon here: https://tinyurl.com/msw6b5js FOR ALL WE KNOW WE DON'T is a darkly comic picture of adolescence in Ireland's boisterous and poetic northeast. A coming-of-age story cycle from the glory days of VHS, Samantha Fox, and escaped paramilitaries. Ireland in the late 1980s. It'...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Chairs What if? You can fill that question in various ways and answer in different art forms. The Little Red Chairs in the title of Edna O’Brien’s novel are symbolic of a wider evil—that of genocide and those involved. It refers to a commemorative art installation in Sarajevo: 11,541 red chairs placed in the street—one for each person killed during the 1,425 day siege, including 643 smaller chairs for...

John Willis had too much material to include in a book of just under 500 pages. The book and BBC oral history project from early in the present century which draws on 47,000 testimonies from ordinary civilians and service personnel. Most go unnamed. Those that are named, represent multitudes. I was particularly interested in Palestine, Monte Cassino and the Gothic Line 1944 because this is where my father fought. It was a particularly bloody...