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Tue, Jul 23, 2019
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Colm Tóibín: “I can’t do any genre-fiction books, really, none of them. I just get bored with the prose. I don’t find any rhythm in it. It’s blank, it’s nothing; it’s like watching TV.” Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Crime writers mystified by Colm Tóibín’s criticism
  • Books
  • Martin Doyle
  • July 22, 2019, 17:02

Literary author’s dismissal of genre fiction provokes backlash

Avengers: Endgame becomes highest-grossing film of all time Avengers: Endgame becomes highest-grossing film of all time
  • Film
  • Donald Clarke
  • July 22, 2019, 09:12

James Cameron’s Avatar knocked from top spot as Marvel film makes €2.5 billion

‘I can’t do thrillers or spy novels or genre fiction. I just get bored' ‘I can’t do thrillers or spy novels or genre fiction. I just get bored'
  • Books
  • Lisa O'Kelly
  • July 22, 2019, 12:10

The author Colm Tóibín discusses female Irish novelists, families, and when he wishes he had a TV

Tomorrowland: ‘I can’t believe my life’ Tomorrowland: ‘I can’t believe my life’
  • Books
  • Patrick Freyne
  • July 22, 2019, 06:00

Sarah Maria Griffin's festival book focuses on two young people and a journey they may be unprepared for

Jack Reynor: ‘It’s good to have a break from talking about my penis’ Jack Reynor: ‘It’s good to have a break from talking about my penis’
  • Film
  • Donald Clarke
  • July 20, 2019, 06:00

The actor has made his first film: ‘I got to wear my own clothes, be Jack all day. Amazing’

Time to take Brendan Behan out of theatrical borstal Time to take Brendan Behan out of theatrical borstal
  • Books
  • John McCourt
  • July 20, 2019, 06:00

The enduring myth of the playwright’s troubled and exuberant personality – Behan as borstal boy, boozer and bomb-maker – continues to upstage his great works

Marking the Bauhaus centenary: a major print exhibition in Dublin Marking the Bauhaus centenary: a major print exhibition in Dublin
  • Visual Art
  • Aidan Dunne
  • July 20, 2019, 06:00

National Gallery show features prints from the 20th century’s most innovative art school

Annie Mac: ‘DJing with a pregnant belly felt kind of groundbreaking’ Annie Mac: ‘DJing with a pregnant belly felt kind of groundbreaking’
  • Music
  • Una Mullally
  • July 20, 2019, 05:00

Irish DJ is an architect of popular music, yet she is almost chronically down to earth

Top Gun sequel is here to remind us some things can remain exactly the same Top Gun sequel is here to remind us some things can remain exactly the same
  • Film
  • Donald Clarke
  • July 19, 2019, 13:20

Tom Cruise was as unblemished as a newly born kitten 34 years ago and not much has changed

Queer Eye: Back on Netflix, whether you want it or not Queer Eye: Back on Netflix, whether you want it or not
  • TV, Radio, Web
  • Peter Crawley
  • July 19, 2019, 15:16

None of the transformations is as profound as what the Fab Five do to the English language

Latest Film

That old bleak magic: Maxine Peake in Gwen Six of the best films to see in cinemas this weekend
Avengers: Endgame has taken in almost €2.5 billion since its release three months ago. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Avengers: Endgame becomes highest-grossing film of all time
Jack Reynor attends the Premiere Of A24’s Midsommar at ArcLight Hollywood in June. Photograph: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images Jack Reynor: ‘It’s good to have a break from talking about my penis’
  • The movie quiz: What was Clint Eastwood’s first film as director?
  • Cats trailer: It's like if celebrities became deformed mutant cats but were still kind of sexy

Film Reviews

Keepers: Holliday Grainger and Anna Paquin in Tell It to the Bees Tell It to the Bees

 
Agnès Varda: Her love of people informed her documentary work. Photograph: Cine-Tamaris Varda by Agnès

 
Eleanor Worthington-Cox as Gwen Gwen

 
The Lion King, featuring the voices of James Earl Jones as Mufasa, and JD McCrary as Young Simba The Lion King

 

TV & Radio

Eve Myles in the second series of Keeping Faith, Tuesday on BBC1 TV guide: 20 of the best shows to watch this week

Daniel Radcliffe and Lulu get blasts from their passt, Keeping Faith and Lethal Weapon return, awfully cute critters, and Irish documentary The Man Who Wanted to Fly

On the issue of Trump’s recent racist comments that four US congresswomen of colour should ‘go home’, Varadkar wouldn’t be drawn into calling out the US president. Photograph: Cole Burston/Bloomberg Leo Varadkar: ‘There’s racism and homophobia. But I’m a big boy, I can take it’
Queer Eye ... Don’t ever change Queer Eye: Back on Netflix, whether you want it or not
  • Weekend TV guide: 9 of the best shows to watch
  • GameFace: Roisin Conaty serves up sexual frankness and women-behaving-badly comedy

Latest Music

Eddie Lee (second from left) with his daughter Mimi and two music legends who taught at the Sligo Jazz Project in 2015, bassist Chuck Rainey (Aretha Franklin, Steely Dan) and saxophonist Ernie Watts (Marvin Gaye, Charlie Haden) with his wife Patricia ‘A silent priest never got a parish’ – how one man brought the jazz world to Sligo

Bassist Eddie Lee played in 1980s pop act Those Nervous Animals but jazz was always in his blood

Ezra Furman plays Cork, Dublin and Galway The week’s best rock and pop gigs
Vocalist Sue Rynhart tours this week with Welsh pianist Huw Warren The week’s best jazz gigs
  • Event of the Week: Hotter Than July
  • Laurel Canyon: a musical revolution in the magic valley

Album Reviews

Dude York: Falling

 
Tommy Halferty & Norma Winstone: Tommy Halferty invites Norma Winstone

 
Ider: Emotional Education

 
The Flaming Lips: King's Mouth

 
Alarmist: Sequesterer

 
The artwork for Ed Sheeran’s No 6 Collaborations Project. Ed Sheeran: No 6 Collaborations Project

 

Latest Books

Colm Tóibín: “I can’t do any genre-fiction books, really, none of them. I just get bored with the prose. I don’t find any rhythm in it. It’s blank, it’s nothing; it’s like watching TV.” Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Crime writers mystified by Colm Tóibín’s criticism

Literary author’s dismissal of genre fiction provokes backlash

Sarah Maria Griffin with a copy of her book The Book of Wisdom, written in conjunction with the Tomorrowlands dance music festival in Antwerp.Photograph:Crispin Rodwell Tomorrowland: ‘I can’t believe my life’
Liz Nugent: ‘I have learned so much from reading other people’s books, whether they are personal essays, historical fiction, literary works, page-turning romantic fiction or crime and thrillers.’ Photograph: Aidan Crawley Liz Nugent: ‘I’m proud that I got published in a tough time for the industry’
  • Kate Mulgrew: ‘I found acceptance in Ireland that I never found in the US’
  • Night Waking, a new story by Lucy Caldwell

Book Reviews

Bina: A Novel in Warnings, a book you must read but can’t
Fake Like Me review: Enjoyable art world murder mystery
When the Irish Invaded Canada: Fenian plan was doomed from the start
Three Women: Trio of sexual histories sympathetically laid bare

Stage

These Stupid Things: As the characters’ desire for each other flickers and flares, will their own judgement become clouded by emotion? The week’s best theatre: Two new plays going by their gut

These Stupid Things at Smock Alley Theatre and Cleft at O’Donoghue Theatre are his week’s highlights

None of the eight guests quite know what they’re doing here Epiphany review: The play that’s a meditation on theatre itself
Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs) runs until Saturday. Photograph: Steve Tanner Dead Dog in a Suitcase review: An abrasive, ragged comic opera
  • Karl Shiels: Maybe because he had been an electrician he was aware of the capacity to shock
  • Dead Dog in a Suitcase: High-octane theatre for turbulent times

Art & Design

People pose for a selfie at the pop-up ‘Diner en Blanc’ event at Nelson Rockefeller Park in Battery City, New York on Wednesday. From 2011 to 2017, more than 250 people died while taking selfies. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images Selfie-obsession: Are selfie-takers vain or just trying to connect?

Taking selfies can put your life at risk, but they can be a healthy form of expression

Bauhaus beauty: Natalia Goncharova’s Female Half Figure, Paul Klee’s The Saint of Inner Light and Oskar Schlemmer’s Concentric Group. Photographs: courtesy of Staatsgalerie Stuttgart Marking the Bauhaus centenary: a major print exhibition in Dublin
Detail from Man is in love and loves what vanishes, by Veronica Bolay Art in Focus – Man is in love and loves what vanishes by Veronica Bolay
  • Five art shows to see this week
  • Gilbert & George: A strange reunion with their younger selves

Unthinkable

Modern mindfulness ‘is complicit with a neoliberal ethos of self-responsibility that reinforces systems of oppression and injustice’. Has mindfulness become just another wing of capitalism?

Unthinkable: Ronald E Purser warns against the rise of ethically neutral and self-absorbed spiritual practises

‘If you go from the Skelligs to the Giant’s Causeway, everything about the land has a mythological surface to it.’ Photograph: David Sleator Ireland can manage without the church but can it do without myths?
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines. ‘The prospect of being at the mercy of a future super-intelligence seems entirely realistic,’ says Malcolm Bull. Photograph: Reuters/Warner Bros Why humans need mercy more than justice to survive
  • Should children be taught to be patriotic?
  • The greatest Irish thinker you’ve never read? It could be this man

Michael Viney's Another Life

Illustration: Michael Viney Poisoned and preyless: obstacles to rewilding Ireland with eagles

Restoring the golden eagle to the west has found the limits to bringing back a carnivore

“Like our neighbours, we once depended wholly on the stream, piped to the house by gravity from one of its higher pools.” Nature takes refuge as drought dries the landscape
“The view from the top balcony can be sublime.” Illustration: Michael Viney Clifftops have given me some of the high point of my life
  • For peat’s sake, our uplands need rain – just not too much at once
  • Michael Viney: The beauty of weeping beeches

Heritage

Saoirse Ronan on the cover of The Irish Times Magazine in September 2007. Saoirse Ronan, a self-assured cover star since the age of 13

The 25-year-old actor preserves all the wit, smarts, and decorum she displayed a decade previously

Moore Street market in Dublin. The report says the 200-year-old market is in a “vicious circle of decline”. Photograph: Getty Images Advisory group says Moore Street market is facing ‘existential crisis’
Commemorative plaque at former home of Countess Markievicz in Rathmines. L-R, Lord Mayor Paul McAuliffe, Charles and Olivia Crichton-Stuart, great grandniece of Markievicz, and their children Angus (9) and Amelia (7). Photograph: Tom Honan Commemorative plaque unveiled on 1916 home of Constance Markievicz
  • Ireland’s oldest Jewish cemetery to reopen after 40 years
  • The Gaelic footballers and fans who refused to fight in the Great War

Tuarascáil

Cad a dhéanfá dá mbeadh na heitleáin lasnairde ag caitheamh buamaí anuas? Grianghraph: Eric Luke An Modh Coinníollach

Is é an modh coinníollach a chothaíonn an tsamhlaíocht, agus is í an tsamhlaíocht a chomáineann an machnamh

‘Tá ócáidí ar nós an Pop Up Gaeltacht sách tábhachtach chun saol sóisialta Gaeilge a sholáthar’. Grianghraf: Dave Meehan/The Irish Times Gá le doirse a oscailt do nuachainteoirí na Gaeilge
Mick Jagger agus na Rolling Stones i bPáirc an Chrócaigh anuraidh. Chasadar i mBaile Átha Cliath i 1965. Grianghraf: Nick Bradshaw Málaí
  • Berlin: Cathair nua-aimseartha atá báite sa stair
  • Cén fáth a bhfuilimid in Mali?

Sponsored

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Entries for the Bic Kids Young Artist Award, a competition that gives budding young artists a chance to let their creativity shine, are now open for 2019

What's on: Galway International Arts Festival 2019 What's on: Galway International Arts Festival 2019

July is here, festival season is upon us, and Galway has become a truly magical place with the arrival of the 42nd Galway International Arts Festival

Subscriber Only

Globalisation was always about much more than increased trade. Its origins lie in the liberalisation of finance and the weakening of nation states. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty The Levelling: An economist’s prescient warning of the growing debt crisis
Tim MacGabhann: from Kilkenny to Mexico Call Him Mine: Dial M for murderous prose
David Nicholls: His latest novel, Sweet Sorrow, is more indie-movie than Hollywood blockbuster. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images Sweet Sorrow review: A quiet, tender testament to first love
Atlantic Podcast A three-part series exploring the mystery of Peter Bergmann - the man who came to Sligo to disappear
 
Game of Thrones: The epic fantasy’s final season News, reviews, recaps and interviews as the series comes to an end
 

Most Read in Culture

1 Colm Tóibín: “I can’t do any genre-fiction books, really, none of them. I just get bored with the prose. I don’t find any rhythm in it. It’s blank, it’s nothing; it’s like watching TV.” Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Crime writers mystified by Colm Tóibín’s criticism
2 Circa 1975: Freddie Mercury in concert during the Queen’s British tour. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images. Freddie Mercury: Bohemian Rhapsody is no tribute. It’s full of unconscious homophobia
3 The citizens’ assembly underlines Ireland’s status as ‘the most innovative democracy in Europe’. Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill Why Ireland’s citizens’ assembly is a model for Europe
4 Queer Eye ... Don’t ever change Queer Eye: Back on Netflix, whether you want it or not
5 River Phoenix photographed in 1991 by Nancy R Schiff/Getty The untold story of River Phoenix, 25 years after his death
6 Annie Mac DJing at the Lost and Found festival, Malta. Photograph: Luke Dyson Annie Mac: ‘DJing with a pregnant belly felt kind of groundbreaking’
7 ‘The book includes at least one Irish joke, which Freud (above) considered very interesting. It’s an old joke, from the 19th century. And it must be said that, while few witticisms remain funny after Freud has analysed them, this one was struggling even before it reached the couch.’ Photograph: Casparius/Hulton Archive/Getty Images The Full Irish, Freud
8 Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson can do nothing with material that has become worse with each installment. Fifty Shades Freed: About as sexy as a 1990s ice-cream ad
9 Shaken and stirred: the 007 club James Bond: 007’s best and worst movies, ranked
10 Kate Mulgrew: moved to a house on Lough Corrib to write her new memoir, How to Forget. ‘There was just me, a crackling fire and a computer. There was nothing to do but for go for it and go with it’ Kate Mulgrew: ‘I found acceptance in Ireland that I never found in the US’
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On My Culture Radar

Hilda Fay: On My Culture Radar Hilda Fay: On My Culture Radar

The actor on her love for Barcelona, The Honest Actors’ Podcast and Mick Flannery

Lisa Harding: “handles a profoundly difficult issue with absolute care and multitudes of heart”
The Book Club Click to join in the discussion about this month's book, Harvesting by Lisa Harding
 

Culture Videos

Cats - official trailer2:22 Cats - official trailer
120 young harp pupils benefit from innovative tuition in Laois2:21 120 young harp pupils benefit from innovative tuition in Laois
Greg O’Shea enters the Love Island villa0:24 Greg O’Shea enters the Love Island villa
Kate Bush lookalikes perform 'Wuthering Heights' dance routine in Dublin2:59 Kate Bush lookalikes perform 'Wuthering Heights' dance routine in Dublin
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Shelved: a selection of books by Irish women writers. Might some of these names figure in the final 12?
Women writers Putting Irish women writers back in the picture
 

Galleries

Brendan Grace at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in 2001. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times Brendan Grace 1951-2019: A life in pictures
Revellers enjoying the 3 day Forever Young 80s Music festival, at Palmerstown House Estate, near Naas. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times Forever Young Festival
Vote 100 Celebrating a century since Irish women won the right to vote
 
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