Blog

Last night, Channel 4’s 24 Hours in Police Custody centred on a case of coercive control which ended, tragically, with the death of the victim. The twist was that the person who died was a man – who had been repeatedly assaulted by his female partner. The programme made for fairly grim viewing. The victim […]

Here at Liberties Press, we were sorry to hear about the death of Shay Healy. Among his many contributions to the gaiety of this and other nations, Shay wrote Ireland’s winning Eurovision entry, ‘What’s Another Year?’ – with which Johnny Logan won the competition in 1980. Logan remains the only artist to have won the […]

Philip Roth once said that people tended to glamourise the process of writing a book. He compared it to building a wall: you put one brick on top of the other, and pretty soon, you have your wall. Fergus Shanahan has built a few walls in his time, but today he dismantled one. This one […]

All professions use jargon: terms which are familiar to insiders – and not to those outside the fold. It’s partly a kind of secret code, designed to keep people out: if you don’t know what a particular term means, you don’t really know what we’re talking about. But it’s also a simple matter of convenience: […]

Last night we watched the documentary film Tina, about the remarkable life of rock ’n’ roll legend Tina Turner. When we talk about “legends”, we’re usually referring to someone who’s dead. Thankfully, despite everything, Tina Turner is still very much still with us. Tina was shown as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, sponsored […]

Let’s call a spade a spade: 2020 will not go down in the annals as a vintage year. The birds continued to sing (more often than before, in fact), and the sun came up in the morning; other than that, many of the things we enjoy – sport, the arts, meeting friends and family for […]

“So, Mr Larkin, you’re a distinguished poet. What are you doing out here in Hull, so far from the centre?” Philip Larkin, possibly after a short pause: “The centre of what?” // “So, Dr Williams, where did you get your English?” William Carlos Williams, possibly after a short pause: “Out of the mouths of Polish […]

I recently took part in a (virtual) session at the Science Foundation Ireland Summit on writing, and publishing, books on scientific subjects. It was a jolly event, and even included some discussion on strong language, Fergus Shanahan taking issue with Luke O’Neill over the title of his new book – and pointing out that there […]