A key to all mythologies
IF THE defining cultural moment of the last fifty years in Northern Ireland is discussed, it will be hard to get around the address given...
Time in Armagh: Montague & Wassell
LOOK, I'M not here to do literary criticism and I'm not here to be a barrier between you and the readers this afternoon. But it has to be...
Seamus Heaney: A Work of Public Art
SEAMUS HEANEY is recognised as one of the major poets in any language of the 20th Century. A native of south Derry, he was raised outside...
Kidnapped, Two Cities, failure & snobs
THERE WAS a list in the Daily Telegraph. All the big broadsheets with their notions of themselves and the self-image of the readership...
Shane: the chance another kid never had
A rhapsody on the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer.
Thing
THERE IS a scene in the 1960 movie The Time Machine when the mechanism works for the first time. A masterpiece only in its steampunk...
My rebel uncles and the empire
The Boer War and an Irish nationalist town
Fistfuls of beryls and rivets and citrines: Edith Sitwell in Lecale
Edith Sitwell and Downpatrick County Down
Worn habitual ways: shire & barony
I WAS first introduced to Edward Boaden Thomas's The Twelve Parts of Derbyshire at the Derwent Poetry Festival in Matlock in 2013....
Swords & pointy slippers: art at play
IN WARNER Brothers’s King Richard and the Crusaders (1954), the Norman monarch (lantern-jawed George Sanders) tests his steel broadsword...
