frankarmstrong Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair. The New York Evening World, 1906. Perhaps others, better acquainted with the genre, may argue to the contrary, but Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel … Read more
The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland … Read more
Deities or daimons held strong associations with the cities of Classical Rome and Greece, projecting how freemen, and sometimes women, wished to represent their civic virtues. Thus Athena, the patron god of Athens, combined an association with crafts such as weaving and valour on the battlefield. The gods of Antiquity yielded to saints or angels … Read more
Standing outside a Dublin hostelry in the drizzle, I fell into conversation with an Ulsterman who arrived with impeccable republican-socialist credentials. I assumed, this would make him sympathetic to the recently vanquished Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. I breezily opined that the long-serving MP for Islington had been the first post-War Labour leader to challenge a … Read more
‘Harold Evans used to say that an investigation only really began to count once the readers – and even the journalists – were bored with it’ Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news? In New York city on Easter Sunday 1929, in a premeditated move, a group of women brought the annual parade to a halt … Read more
And the people came from far, And they came from near, To see the troubadours. From ‘The Troubadours‘ by Van Morrisson. I – Lockdown Daze I was strung out on the bed, for the zillionth time, listening to a Van Morrison record. For a large part of the lockdown Van’s music played over and over. … Read more
‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’ Vincent Mercier on his editor at The Bell Sean O’Faoláin. In this second and final instalment, Frank Armstrong reviews Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices edited by Mark O’Brien and … Read more
This is the first of two articles occasioned by the recent publication of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices, edited by Mark O’Brien & Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin. Here, Frank Armstrong reviews the first instalment in this illuminating study, Periodicals and Journalism … Read more
Robert Fisk wrote: ‘we journalists try – or should try – to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know, no one told us.”[i] To be an … Read more
Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic … Read more