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  • Round up the usual suspects

    Trusty favourites will be out in force at the Oscars late tomorrow night. Michael Dwyer , Film Correspondent, predicts who will get the statuettes p
Arts

  • Ruling the hip-hop airwaves

    First he put a whole lotta love into hip-hop and now Ja Rule wants rappers to stop squabbling, he tells Siobhan Grogan. p

  • A terrible truth laid bare

    Gerard Mannix Flynn's 'James X' is a brilliant mix of theatre, documentary and direct human encounter, writes Fintan O'Toole. p
Book ReviewsBack to Top

  • Voice at full power

    Autobiography: Of Nuala O'Faolain's many gifts, writes Éilís Ní Dhuibhne ,  her greatest is her voice: that warm, intimate tone which whispers along her finely crafted sentences and seduces the reader with something that is more than sincerity, honesty, wryness, although it comprises elements of all these qualities. It is that voice above all which gives her the power to draw the reader in and keep her enthralled. p

  • Synge the song

    Irish Culture: In The Theatre of Nation , Ben Levitas sees the Irish theatre and politics as distinct but overlapping spheres of cultural activity. Because the theatre movement always used the term "national" in its various configurations, it ensured that its productions would not be assessed on purely aesthetic or dramatic criteria but as contributions to a wider cultural and political debate, writes Anthony Roche. p

  • Rising through Troubles

    Biography: What a piece of work is Mary McAleese. This book is an authorised biography, written in Irish. The President's unauthorised life story has already appeared in English, so one doubts if there would be sufficient demand for an English translation of the present volume. That would be a pity, because the story told here deserves a wider audience, says Deaglán de Bréadún. p

  • American techie feels the heat in Tiger country

    Irish Fiction: Curtis Adler's January Colours is about Paul, an American techie who moves to Ireland with his wife in the midst of the Celtic Tiger boom. Things naturally don't go according to plan, but if Adler intended his book as a satire on the Celtic Tiger, then it's just not funny enough, writes Bernice Harrison. p

  • Old world, new journey

    Autobiography: Best known as Cosmopolitan's agony aunt, Irma Kurtz has been a London-based writer of books and articles for some 30 years. Two years ago, she found the journal she kept in 1954 on her first trip to Europe, and was inspired to retrace that journey with her teenage notes in hand. Reviewed by Mary Maher. p

  • Souffles of melancholy

    Biography: In London during the second World War, Nancy Mitford was asked to lecture on fire-watching and how to deal with incendiary devices. Then she was asked to stop. "Well you see," it was explained to her, "it's your voice. It irritates people so much, they said they'd like to put you on fire." p

  • The state of the Saami

    Travel: Roger Took is described on the fly-leaf as "an art historian and museum curator", a description which, as one reads his story, comes to seem almost a sly joke, writes Michael Viney. p

  • The prison house of language

    Cultural Criticism: As critical credentials go, Ella O'Dwyer's are rarer than most. How many other literary or cultural critics can personally "attest to the authority of  Foucault's work, having spent years imprisoned in the Victorian time warps of Brixton and Durham"? p

  • Grieving for Germany

    Fiction: German history, with its many ghosts and secrets, continues to stalk the fiction of Günter Grass, one of the world's great storytellers. His career is proving almost as fantastical as his early work. The influence of his début, The Tin Drum , explosive on its publication in 1959, is still felt throughout the literary world, writes Eileen Battersby. p

  • Silence in the land of song

    History Briefs: Patrick Hickey focuses on one of the most shocking theatres of the Great Famine. The Mizen Peninsula lost 38 per cent of its population between 1841 and 1849. Father Hickey's exhaustive research introduces people who do not feature in general histories of the Famine. p

  • Paperbacks

    Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye on the latest crop of paperbacks including Anthony Beevor's Berlin: the Downfall 1945 and Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi. p
About UsBack to Top

  • The great water divide

    Management of the world's water resources must not be reduced to politically motivated decisions. Patrick Smyth reports from Kyoto. p

  • Tapping the trees for a refreshing sip of sap

    ANOTHER LIFE: A glimmer of silver in the willow-twigs, a precocious peep of folded leaves from the horse-chestnut's sticky-bud; both speak of the rise of sap in spring - but not in the literal sense that most of us imagine. The picture we inherited as children, of sap sinking down in autumn and welling up again in spring, leaves the trees empty, as it were, for the winter, writes Michael Viney. p

  • Horizons

    Killarney spring school: Red deer spotting, bat watching and a tour of the early copper mines on Ross peninsula in Co Kerry are highlights of this year's Spring School at the Killarney National Park Education Centre, Killarney, Co Kerry from April 4th to 6th. p

  • Eye on Nature

    Michael Viney responds to reader's queries and observations on nature. p

  • Eco Web

    www.friendsoftheirishenvironment.net : The archive of environmental news stories from Irish newspapers is probably the best feature of this website. p
Seen & HeardBack to Top

  • OK, let's get this war rolling

    TV REVIEW: 'It's comin'. It's comin' soon," promised the Fox News presenter on Tuesday. Be patient. Calm yourselves. Pull the fridge closer to the sofa. Turn the lights off. Put the placard in the attic. Both the shock and the awe will be along shortly. p

  • A flurry of talk in the desert air

    RADIO REVIEW: 'With this technology, the US will know the exact location of any legitimate leader of any foreign country and be able to destroy him . . . and that's terrific." Retired US admiral Gene LaRocque was almost certainly being intentionally provocative when he spoke in the wee hours of Thursday morning on the BBC World Service. p

  • It's a dog's life in the wild west

    THE LAST STRAW/Frank McNally: Justice in Texas has sometimes been a law unto itself, as anyone who saw the film, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, will know. Judge Roy held court in a saloon and declared himself "the only law west of the Pecos". But the colourful traditions of Texan jurisprudence seem to be continuing, if a recent court case there - in which a man was sentenced to 30 nights in a dog-house - is any indication. p
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