the narrative arts – theatre, film and literature – are the windows through which the rest of us are enabled to experience the lives of others. If those lives are miss-represented then it creates the cultural attitudes that drive some men to behave inappropriately toward women Continue reading Saturday Sound Off – #METO and the difficulty of creating believable characters.
It could have been any street in any industrial town or city in England that winter evening early in 1970. Almost fifty years later it is impossible to recall with accuracy the nature of the buildings that lined it, illuminated in the orange glow of sodium lighting. I imagine most would have been closed and shuttered except perhaps for a launderette or a tobacconist. A dress shop, hardware store and pharmacy would have ceased trading an hour or two earlier. A fish and chip shop would have announced its presence long before I reached it. It was around 7pm and … Continue reading An Angry Young Man
Here’s something we don’t hear enough about. Ireland was neutral during World War II which it euphemistically called ‘The Emergency’. The Prime Minister at the time even astonished Allied leaders by sending his condolences to the German government on the death by suicide of Adolf Hitler. But many ordinary Irish people went beyond the call of duty in their humanitarian response to the suffering caused by fascism. Here David Lawlor tells us about a Cork woman whose efforts saved the lives of thousands of children. via Ireland’s Holocaust heroine Continue reading An Irish Heroine
I am not a historian. I have recently begun studying history in a very informal way. I have not studied under a professional historian as one would if one took a university course. I read the works of others who are professionals. Sometimes reading about the same events as presented by different historians is instructive. One quickly learns that each historian brings his or her own perspective to understanding the event or events. Often that perspective is, consciously or sub-consciously, political. For example, I find that many Irish writers discussing the famine that afflicted Ireland between 1845 and 1852 seem … Continue reading Blame: Job of Historians, or Not?
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