“for Mr Ó Nualláin, ‘might have been’ has loomed largely in his college life - larger than his bantam strutting will admit”
“When Mr Fitzpatrick grows up, he will find that ‘might-have-been’ figures too largely in his own little life, as in everybody else’s, to be safely employed as a weapon against others.”
I’ve recently read No [...]

José Saramago 1922 - 2010
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) - [...]

Book review: ‘Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century’ by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)
This inspiring book examines how women challenged many aspects of public and private life between the 1880s and 1920s, in Britain and in the USA. They did so from different positions in the political spectrum, as liberals, socialists [...]

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

Book Review: Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, Zero Books, 2009
Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman is a slim but muscular volume, whose pithy prose goes straight to the heart of the challenges currently facing contemporary feminism. Constructed as a series of short, cut-to-the-chase essays on a diverse range of ‘raw-nerve’ topics, from Sarah Palin and the [...]

‘The injustice of time - rendered obsolete.’

Rain falls on the snow. The Contagion has taken hold. Ghosts from the old Dead Republic are emerging everywhere as the day of judgement approaches.
On Black Tuesday a guilt ridden political functionary runs from his job burying bodies in the city. He is tortured by voices of reproach as [...]

Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]

Performance Poetry goes Live, Wild and Nationwide with Dave Lordan and Elaine Feeney
Writers and performers Dave Lordan and Elaine Feeney are to tour their much anticipated new books with their Where’s the Sacrifice? tour over the summer months.
Lordan and Feeney are both award winning writers and stars of Ireland’s exploding live poetry and cabaret scene.
Lordan’s [...]

The performance troupe Scream Blue Murmur, formerly known as the Belfast Poets’ Touring Group, are pathbreakers in Ireland’s currently burgeoning live arts scene. Here they are interviewed by fellow poet and performer Dave Lordan of Irish Left Review on the eve of setting off on their latest North American Tour with their new show ”Something’s Gone [...]

Gaza via London
Oh child of chance,
Oh blasted child,
Fair as ever anything,
Universe of wasted grace.
Kneeling now and always now
In your ruined house
Hearing troops of a general doom
Whistling with purpose
While priming their mortars for you.