Books Ireland (Feb. 2001): Review

Dermot Healy has played the lead in Nicola Bruce’s film of Irish emigrant life in London, I Could Read the Sky; also dir. Beckett’s Footfalls; and ed. Force 10.

Nuala O’Faolain, interview with Shirley Kelly, Books Ireland, Feb. 2001, pp.7-8; success of Are You Somebody? (1996) based on 200pp. autobiographical essay at front which overshadowed The Irish Times-column pieces inside; editor Anthony Glavin; ‘one of the most poignant and candid pieces of autobiography ever to appear in Ireland’; took leave from Irish times, 1998; settled in Greenwich Village to write novel, My Dream of You.

Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies (1999), best-seller conspiracy theory concerning Mossad involvement in death of Princess Diana; in dispute with Sunday Independent in 1993 over mendacious ‘interview’ with Bishop Casey in S. America; former Daily Express correspondent; settled in Ireland in the late 1960s. [Deleted from Dataset]

Fintan Cullen, ed., Sources in Irish Art: A Reader (Cork UP 2000), contains Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry; Samuel Madden; Lady Morgan’s Life of Salvator Rosa; David Wilke’s letter frm Ireland; Thomas Davis; George Petrie; W. B. Yeats; Elizabeth Thompson, Mainie Jellet, and others.

Arlen House founded by Catherine Rose and revived by Alan Hayes is the topic of an article (‘The Reborn Feminist’) in Books Ireland, March 2001.

Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput 2000), contains interviews with John Banville, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Semaus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, John McGahern, Derek Mahon, Tom Murphy, Nuala Ní Dhomnhnaill, Edna O’Brien, and William Trevor [RTE, 18 Nov. 2000 to 10 February 2001]

Desmond Traynor, reviewing same in Books Ireland (March 2001), quotes Declan Kiberd’s introduction: ‘It is just possible that “Irish writing” will, in the next five or six decades., be subsumed back into the general fiction category from which it so recently and so precariously emerged. If a novelist such as John Banville or a poet such as Patrick Kavanagh had their wish, that is precisely what would happen.’ (BI, p.57.)

Bewley spent the war in Italy and wrote a novel there; later he published a biography of Hermann Goering.

Blake, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, first pub. 1956; commissioned by Stormont in 1951; airbrushes contrib. of Irish Fire Brigade in Blitz.

Anthony Clare, On Men and Masculinity (London: Chatto & Windus [2001]), 270pp.

Wilde signed letters to Oxford friends as Oscar F. O’F. Wilde

Feargal Cochrane, Unionist Politics and the Politics of Unionism since the Anglo-Irish Agreement [2nd edn.] (Cork UP 2001).

Thomas J., Morrissey, SJ., William J. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin 1841-1921 (Four Courts 2000), 416pp. £IR30; Books Ireland review, April 2001, p.105; Walsh succeeded Cullen who was held to be too cosy with the British Govt. by many Irish priests; Walsh presided over Maynooth; Cardinal’s hat; admired Cardinal Manning; skille dnegotiator in industrial disputes; presided over funeral of Willie Redmond, 1917; opposed conscription; appeared at funeral of Thomas Ash, hunger striker; d. 1921.

Donnchadh O Corrain, James Hogan [1898-1963]: Revolutionary, Historian and Political Scientist,. Four Courts£31.50 Papers of comm. conference of 1998 at centenary of IRB man who became Dir. of Intelligence of the National Army in the Civil War; contrib. Maurice Manning, Margaret MacCurtain, John A. Murphy, Dermot Keogh.

Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (OUP 2001), 512pp.

Tony Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney (Wolfhound 2000), £IR15. [updated and enl. rep. of l1982; incl. Helen Vendler, Ciaraon Carson, Anne Stevenson, Douglas Dunne, Bernard O’Donoghue]

Kirkpatrick, Kathyrn, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 2000), incl. Medbd McGuckian, ‘Women are Trousers’, an excerpt from her diary.]

Note that William Allingham’s Night and Day Songs was cover ill. by William Morris.

Roger Derham,, The Simurgh and the Nightingale, Collins Press 2001, concerns a female doctor Certherine who is kidnapped by Algerian pirates in the seventeenth century and becomes invlved in a knight-errant quest to Constantinople and beyond. Purportedly based on true events.

Benedict Kiely, Writer and Saoi’, feature article, Books Ireland (Summer 2001), pp.157-58. Quotes Colum McCann’s preface to the Collected Stories (Methuen): ‘The manner in which Ben Kiely has been treated should be a point of anger among anyone concerned with contemporary Irish literature since the truth is that as much as any other writer in the past fifty years he has made the past durable and the present possible.’ His partner Frances; b. Dromore, 1919; raised Omagh; ed. Christian Brothers; novitiate in Jesuits; contrib. Father Mathew Record; entered UCD 1940; worked on Catholic Standard; Radio Eireann; leader writer, Irish Independent; moved to Irish Press as lit. editor; m. 1944; four children; met Frances after he succeeded MacManus at Irish Press; accom. him to Virginia, Oregon and Atlanta in 1964; sought leave of absence from Irish Press and refused; contrib. to New Yorker; Letter from America to Irish Times; returned to Ireland, 1968; Saoi in 1996.

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Maurice Leitch, The Eggman’s Apprentice (2001), narrated in first person of Hugo Dinsmore in the 1950s; orphaned and plunged into tough world of country relatives; cousins

Kathleen Coyle, Liv concerns a young Norwegian woman who travels to Paris to meet her disgraced aunt Sonja on the verge of her marriage to Hald Christensen; she learns that ‘we are never ourselves until we go away’ from the man she falls in love with in Paris.

Colfer, Eoin, Artemis Fowl (Viking 2001), concerns a 12-year old boy protagonist and anti-hero; uses computer skills to conduct a surveillance operation on fairies at Fowl Manor in an attempt to get their fairy gold; previously issued Ed’s Bed (O’Brien Press)

Ross, Ian Campbell, Laurence Sterne: A Life (OUP 2001), 512pp.; Sterne’s mother had an embroidery school in Dublin; Byron damaged his reputation by calling him an miserly and undutiful son; Thackeray wrote of ‘foul satyr’s eyes’ staring out of his prose; Leavis called Tristram Shandy nasty and trifling; his father badly injured in duel;

Tom Kinsella set up shop to sell the Peppercanister Poems from 47 Percy Lane. The Familiar (No. 20); Godhead (No. 21); Citizen of the World (No. 22); :Littlebody (No.23.)

Ed. notes The Hole was modelled on school experiences of the director, a grad. of Campbell college.

Alan Harrison, on John Toland (1994).

Books Listed
Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies Since 1922 (OUP [1999]), 398pp.
Kennedy, Michael, & Skelly, Joseph Morrison, Irish Foreign Policy Irish 1919-1966: From Independence to Internationalism (Dublin: Four Courts [1999]), 350pp.
McGarry, Fergal, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War (Cork UP 2000), 336pp.
Regan, John M., The Irish Counter-revolution 1921-1936 (Gill & Macmillan [1999]), 491pp.
Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990).
John C. Ryan, The Broken Place (Cromwell Publ. 2000), 212pp., novel by man born in Carrick on Suir, 1932.
Harry Clifton, On the Spine of Italy (1999), memoir.
Barry Desmond, Finally and In Conclusion: A Political Memoir (New Island 2000), 411pp., 16pp. photos.
Kieran Allen, Bust to Boom? The Irish Experience of Growth and Inequality (IPA [2000]) .

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