Gabriel Conroy

8 results

Joe Biden’s reference to James Joyce as an Irish poet, and not as novelist or short-story writer, may have taken some by surprise. Photograph: Hulton Getty
A portrait of the artist as poet – An Irishman’s Diary on James Joyce

We well know by now that America’s new president Joe Biden likes to quote Irish poets, particularly Seamus Heaney. His eve of inauguration reference t(...)

House of The Dead: the barrister Brendan Kilty saved 15 Usher’s Island from structural collapse
House of The Dead: What to do with Joyce’s literary landmark?

On a freezing cold winter’s night in 1987 I was dancing by myself on the first floor of a derelict squat at the wrong end of Dublin’s quays. Debris, d(...)

In common with other hard liquors, gin doesn’t freeze in mere Beast-from-the-East temperatures 
Do you want ice with that? An Irishman’s Diary about wintry literature and drink

One of the many events that succumbed to the weather this week was the launch in Dublin of a “James Joyce Gin”. It was supposed to happen in The Baile(...)

“The squelching was interrupted only by the occasional splash, where the rains had not yet found a vacancy in the soil”
Soft Day in South Galway – An Irishman’s Diary about cross-country running and mud

I woke up last Sunday thinking of the famous closing passage from James Joyce’s The Dead. This was partly because of the weather, which was broadly si(...)

Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)
From Bram to Brooklyn: 10 great films adapted from Irish literature

Even the doziest domestic observer will have noticed that Irish cinema is passing through an unprecedented period of fecundity. Others are blowing ou(...)

“Alas, my knock on the door of No 15 went unheard, except apparently by a giant papier maché head of Joyce that leered at me from a ground-floor window”
Food for thought – An Irishman’s Diary about James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, and Ada Rehan

Rain was general all over Ireland on Wednesday night. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly up(...)

James Joyce: no stranger to ghosts. Photograph: Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
The ghosts in James Joyce’s modern machine
  • Books
  • December 3, 2015, 06:00

WB Yeats is often viewed as being away with the fairies in the Celtic twilight, whereas James Joyce is considered a man of this world, grounded in th(...)