Great launch last night for #ThePursuitofKindness by Éamonn Toland. Many thanks to legendary (and sprightly!) editor Alan Rinzler for launching, Hannah Bright of Midas PR for hosting, and all the attendees, for some insightful questions. Most of all, to the man of the moment, Éamonn, who talks a good game as well as writing a […]
At the weekend, I was lucky enough to get to the National Gallery to see the exhibition New Perspectives: the artworks the gallery has acquired over the past decade. Alongside some fine oil paintings – which you might have been expecting – there are plenty of photographs, as well as line drawings, along with one […]
Many moons ago, I was a student in a tutorial on Late Anglo-Saxon England – a growth area in historical research at the time. (Hard to believe that there are growth areas even in such staid professions, but there you have it.) Our tutor passed around a number of grisly-looking weapons of war for our […]
“Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes. Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish.” –––William Carlos Williams For much of modern human history, it has been believed that survival of the fittest holds sway. Or, to put it another way, […]
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 […]