As French President, François Mitterrand enjoyed his fair share of sumptuous feasts in the haute cuisine tradition. His enduring esteem reflects a wider French anxiety, in an era of Globalisation, expressed by Pascal Ory, as to whether French cuisine will be ‘all that remains when everything else has been forgotten?’[i] Thus, in 1996, for his … Read more
St. Helens University agronomy department was not the stuff of which headlines are made, but as a professor of horticultural science, he knew that his recent discovery, and the terrifying message he was entrusted to deliver, had to reach people with maximum impact. There was no time for academic papers. It had to be hammered … Read more
Over the past year I developed a musical work reflecting the precarious times we are living through. This composition HERE WE ARE NOW is music for an ensemble of four electric guitars, bass, drums, percussion, and saxophonics. My aim was to produce art with radical import. As well as creating an engaging, innovative, and powerful … Read more
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock. Charles Lamb In 1954, when I was aged nine, my youthful uncle, aged twenty-five, returned to Ireland from … Read more
I was pretty sure I was going to die, sooner rather than later, one midsummer’s night in Libya’s desert. It was 1988. A cousin of Colonel Ghaddafi, a military man, was driving us to meet the Great Man himself. In the darkness, we had turned left off the tarmacadamed main road between Benghazi and Tripoli, … Read more
Sail-Rail passage between Dublin and London currently takes about eight hours – but could be slashed to under four. The emergence of what the Swede’s call ‘flight shame’ in this era of Climate Change, may motivate many to look for alternatives on what is Europe’s busiest air corridor. I – Outset An era of climate … Read more
Entering the dragon’s den I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are … Read more
Repost… The year is 1500 and Jesus Christ returns – to the city of Seville in Spain. There he performs a sequence of miracles, whereupon he is arrested and hauled before the Grand Inquisitor, as imagined by Ivan Karamazov – a character from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In his infinite mercy he … Read more
Cassandra’s Cultural Roundabout is a light-hearted take on the cultural scene of Dublin and beyond, containing the odd acerbic note. Make Merry We know precisely how fine a documentary film maker Sé Merry Doyle is from our experience working with him on his short film, ‘Cassandra Voices – the Hard Copy.’ Sé put two chronically … Read more
We don’t discuss white America’s common pathology. What we’ve begun, within limits, are discussions on racism, bigotry, white nationalism, and other disorders of the mind. Ever so guarded, these conversations are restricted to speculation about just who is a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist, and always in the mode of, ‘us and them,’ … Read more