November, 2009

I’m preparing to drive the length of England in nine days’ time – starting at Stranraer and going all the way down to Cambridge. According to Mapquest, the journey is around 350 miles and it’ll take just under six hours. I wonder if anyone has told them I’ll be driving a Toyota Yaris? It’s not […]

I’m preparing to drive the length of England in nine days’ time – starting at Stranraer and going all the way down to Cambridge. According to Mapquest, the journey is around 350 miles and it’ll take just under six hours. I wonder if anyone has told them I’ll be driving a Toyota Yaris? It’s not […]

I remember Henry Kelly. Yes, that one – the one who presented ‘Game for a Laugh’ and ‘Going for Gold’ on TV. When he went for this red-nose, mass-market end of things, there was a cry that he’d abandoned serious journalism, what a loss. I also remember him at UCD in the early 1960s, where […]

</a I remember Henry Kelly. Yes, that one – the one who presented ‘Game for a Laugh’ and ‘Going for Gold’ on TV. When he went for this red-nose, mass-market end of things, there was a cry that he’d abandoned serious journalism, what a loss. I also remember him at UCD in the early 1960s, […]

I hate this time of year, partly because winter comes lolloping in on a wave of rain and wind (can you have a wave of wind?) and partly because it’s the time when people talk a lot of poppycock about poppies. There’s nothing can be done about the rain and wind but it’s really time […]

I hate this time of year, partly because winter comes lolloping in on a wave of rain and wind (can you have a wave of wind?) and partly because it’s the time when people talk a lot of poppycock about poppies. There’s nothing can be done about the rain and wind but it’s really time […]

So we’re going to have a northern version of the Ryan Report, checking out the abuses of children in Catholic (and maybe state-run) homes and institutions. Since the pursuit of child-abusers has now taken on quite a few of the trappings of a witch hunt (remember the paediatrician whose home was besieged by a mob […]

So we’re going to have a northern version of the Ryan Report, checking out the abuses of children in Catholic (and maybe state-run) homes and institutions. Since the pursuit of child-abusers has now taken on quite a few of the trappings of a witch hunt (remember the paediatrician whose home was besieged by a mob […]

I was talking to a close relative of mine yesterday morning and when I mentioned that I was going to a talk by Noam Chomsky in the afternoon, the response was a slight grimace and the judgment that Chomsky in recent times had become ‘shrill’. As it happens, nothing could have been further from the […]

I was talking to a close relative of mine yesterday morning and when I mentioned that I was going to a talk by Noam Chomsky in the afternoon, the response was a slight grimace and the judgment that Chomsky in recent times had become ‘shrill’. As it happens, nothing could have been further from the […]