Ulysses is a modern novel by Irish writer John Joyce, which was first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920., and the entire book was published by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 2022. According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.  Ulysses chronicles the appointments and encounters of the itinerant Leopold Bloom in Dublin  in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904/  Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey and the novel establishes and … Continue reading Irish writer

The New Labour Government of Tony Blair  was criticized by columnist Will Hutton for misusing the work of the American twentieth century’s  greatest political philosopher  John Rawls, who died in 2002, aged 81. Hutton highlighted how  Ministers routinely  appealed to a  “bastardi§sed Rawlsianism”  to justify widening levels of inequality. According to Rawls’ liberal-egalitarian notion of “justice as fairness”, set out in his A Theory of `justice (1971), we need not worry about the gap between rich and poor so long as there is a basic level of social support for the worst off. The problem according to Hutton, was this … Continue reading Rediscovering John Rawls, Justice and fairness

Affinity is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching the subject via discrete examples, Affinity is first of all about images that have stayed with Irish critic, essayist and memoiris, Brian Dhillon over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation,, when the visual field had shrunk. He delivered a paper on “photographic moments” in literature. A young colleague’s response: “This was all very well but seemed to consist only of connections”, where, he asked , was the argument? Dillion spotted, teased … Continue reading Photographic moments

“We’re all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles”. Set in the fag end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London Purveyor of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Millward’s story of 1960s Soho, told in Polari slang, with elements of sailors’ Italian, Yiddish, Romany and Irish spread from travellers of fairgrounds and dockyard to become a coded dialect for gay men in the mid-20th century Britain. Man-eating typewriter unspools in flavoursome Polari with intricate, hilarious and recounts … Continue reading Swinging Sixties

Presidents of US, EU and France have all stuck deals in 2023 with Rishi Sunak and has agreements on the Northern Ireland protocol, the Aukus security pact, and bilateral co-operation on migration and defence with France. The Tory party, is the world’s most successful centre-right political party governing for two thirds of the past 100 years, who has an infinite capacity for reinvention after the fever dream of Brexit and Trumpian insurgency. Reinventing its ideology and changing its leaders have been pivotal to its election successes. Historian, Tim Bale, offers an analytical narrative of the Tory Party since Britain voted … Continue reading Convincing and most adaptable

Beijing-based international lawyer who lived in China for more than 25-years, James Zimmerman’s gripping new book The Peking Express recreates the incident at 2:40am on May 6th 1923, a short distance from the town of Lincheng in Shandong province, in which bandits kidnapped Peking Express, a luxury train and a first-class sleeper carriage carrying the bejewelled members of the global elite with a pre-dawn clever derailment, using rifle shotes like firecrackers, smashing windows creating chaos, Some of the passengers were shot dead as the bandits stormed the train, while others were injured. Although a few managed to escape by crawling … Continue reading Elites kidnapped