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  • The glossy side of Brit Art

    Gary Hume may have started out by painting doors, but he now loves the unforeseen directions that painting can take him. He remains the leading painter to have emerged from the Young British Artists, writes Aidan Dunne ,Art Critic. p

  • The dark stuff

    Like 'kids who say the things they shouldn't and then laugh', comedy is a way of taking power, Kevin Gildea tells Stephen Dixon. p
Arts

  • Penning their protest

    ON THE TOWN/Catherine Foley: Writers protested with their pens at an anti-war gathering in the Irish Writers' Centre this week. The result is Irish Writers Against the War, a book with 51 contributions, edited by historian Conor Kostick and Katherine Moore, an administrator in the Irish Writers' Centre. p

  • Peeking behind the scenes

    ON THE TOWN/Kevin Courtney: Newsflash: television broadcasting is a hotbed of sex, romance and intrigue. Former RTÉ producer Anita Notaro launched her new exposé of the industry, Back After The Break, at the Four Seasons hotel,Dublin, and she was naming names. p

  • Brit Art takes over IMMA

    ON THE TOWN/Catherine Foley: Irish and British artists arrived to view the work of Gary Hume, whose exhibition opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin this week. p

  • Open house for the passions of Patton

    ON THE TOWN/Catherine Foley: Cilla Patton, the winner of an art competition run by RTÉ's Open House and the quarterly Irish Arts Review, was congratulated by guests at an exhibition of the winning entries at the Private Collector Gallery on South Frederick Street this week. p

  • Gaiety to get €1.8m makeover

    ARTSCAPE/Deirdre Falvey: The Gaiety Theatre is to be refurbished in June at a cost of about €1.8m. The beautiful Victorian theatre, owned by Denis and Caroline Desmond, has needed infrastructural investment for some time and will close for five weeks while the work is carried out. p
Book ReviewsBack to Top

  • Provisional roads to peace

    History: The IRA is history: so Richard English's superb new book tells us. History, in that its long war is over but also in the sense that it is now a historical phenomenon, part of the comprehensible past rather than the opaque present and future, writes Peter Hart. p

  • The pot, the kettle, and the press secretary

    Journalism:  If one of the talents of good press relations or spin doctoring is timing, which Sir Bernard Ingham had in abundance when he was Margaret Thatcher's press secretary, then it would appear he has lost it. Reviewed by Michael Foley. p

  • Rediscovered US master in Vintage form

    Fiction: Every week, or so it seems, a new literary genius is discovered. Hype, admittedly, determines not so much the content of the reviews as who gets reviewed. Publishing has become far less about books and far more about the people who write them. Yet for every new literary talent and each tired established star writing the same book again and again, wonders continue to emerge, writes Eileen Battersby. p

  • In the marketplace of lies

    Cinema: Producer Sam Spiegel's third wife said he would rather climb a tree than tell the truth, and that's one reason he was so successful in Hollywood, Brecht's "marketplace of lies".  Reviewed by Stephen Dixon p

  • Building the structure

    Irish Fiction: Glenn Patterson set himself high standards. His first novel, Burning Your Own (1988), which established his enduring Belfast theme, was such a convincing version of the friendship-across-the-divide scenario that it won the Rooney Prize. p

  • Think local, rock global

    Irish Fiction: Gar Private in Brian Friel's Philadelphia Here I Come! says that no-one can truly appreciate the fun there is in growing up in what seems like a provincial backwater in Ireland. John Kelly knows, though, and the hypothesis underlining his new novel is that much of the teenage angst caused by the feeling that a world of excitement exists elsewhere has as much to do with a state of mind as with the actualities of geography. Reviewed by Derek Hand. p

  • The poisonous time

    Adolescent fiction: Writing for teenagers is now a fully-fledged genre with its own idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses, writes Robert Dunbar p

  • The Ah! factor wins through

    Pre-teens: Niall MacMonagle rounds up the latest books for the 10-12 age group. p

  • The draw of Drohobycz

    Biography: In 1933, T.S. Eliot remarked in passing that "reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable" if one wishes to develop a tradition. He was explaining what he called "a primer of modern heresy", and the main culprits were D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and the Romantic poets, among others. p

  • Writing wrong

    Popular Fiction: Bernice Harrison on the latest crop of authors. p

  • Paperbacks

    Paperbacks for children reviewed by Christine Madden and Orna Mulachy. p
About UsBack to Top

  • The slow slide to extinction

    The world's sixth mass extinction may be upon us as a direct result of human depredations, writes Dick Ahlstrom , Science Editor. p

  • The spring stirrings of the sleeping beauties

    ANOTHER LIFE:   In the first two weeks of this memorably dry and sunny spring, dollops of frogspawn were stranded like gleaming jellyfish in the fast-evaporating garden pond, and it seemed a tadpole-friendly idea to refloat them now and then with an inflow from the garden hose, writes Michael Viney. p

  • Horizons

    Rash of real nappies: It may sound hippy dippy, but the use of cloth nappies instead of disposable ones is a growing trend. p

  • Eye on Nature

    Michael Viney responds to reader's queries and observations on nature. p
Seen & HeardBack to Top

  • In need of refurbishment

    TV REVIEW/Shane Hegarty: Do television producers hold dinner parties at which they discuss the value of their property programmes? ("Our property show has a book deal to accompany it." "Well, that would make our programme worth a book deal too, because ours has been given a two-year contract with BBC2.") p

  • Exclusive: your guide to the lexicon of war

    RADIO REVIEW/Harry Browne: This review is made possible by a dictionary sitting beside the radio - a recommended resource for listeners dazed by the mismatch between what they're hearing and their own knowledge of the English language. Here's a tiny sample from this week's well-thumbed pages. p

  • April Fool! - at least I think it is

    THE LAST STRAW: A few years ago I was assigned by my editor to write an April Fool's story. This is a delicate mission in any newspaper, but especially in an organ as respectable as this, writes Frank McNally p
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