Richard Ellmann

6 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(...)

Georgie Hyde-Lees with her husband William Butler Yeats. She became the most influential of his muses. He described the leanhaun shee as the Gaelic muse, giving inspiration to those she persecutes. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
In search of the banshee and the elusive lennanshee

Everybody in Ireland still knows what a banshee is, even if reported sightings seem to have tailed off dramatically since the coming of rural electrif(...)

Colm Tóibín: ‘I can’t do thrillers and I can’t do spy novels. I can’t do any genre-fiction books, really, none of them.’ Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times
‘I can’t do thrillers or spy novels or genre fiction. I just get bored'
  • Books
  • July 22, 2019, 11:09

Colm Tóibín, award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and professor of the humanities at Columbia University, New York, was born in En(...)

Our dad the poet: Seamus, Catherine, Mick, Marie and Chris Heaney in the 1970s. Photograph © Bobbie Hanvey; courtesy National Library of Ireland
Seamus Heaney, our dad the poet, by Catherine, Chris and Mick Heaney

Five years after the jolt of Seamus Heaney’s unexpected death we are back at a moment. Back with Heaney, whose poems resonate with the rhythm of the l(...)

The Joyce tower in Sandycove, Co Dublin, from which Stephen Dedalus began his odyssey in ‘Ulysses’.
Leopold Bloom’s arithmetical adventures

As Bloomsday approaches, there is merit in reflecting on James Joyce’s relationship with mathematics. He entered UCD in September 1898. His examinatio(...)

Author Julia O'Faolain’s latest book, Trespassers, is an exuberant memoir of the great and the good in Irish political and cultural life. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Julia O'Faolain: a star in an artistic galaxy

Julia O’Faolain looks a little bit lost, somehow. She has come from London to Dublin to publicise her newly-published memoir, Trespassers . It is a(...)