Author Jude Collins

    Joyce’s story “THE DEAD” has been hailed by many giants of Literature as the greatest short story in the English language. Joyce was born in 1872 the year in which men sharing his surname and speaking and understanding only Irish were sentenced to death in Ireland following a trial conducted in English (without […]

    Did the Soviet Union or Russia since its time ever dishonour a treaty or other agreement?   Did England, or the UK ever honour one in the past 500 years.   It seems that Maxim Litvinov who handled Soviet Foreign Policy from 1929 to1939 was an extremely “good egg” whose commitment to peace […]

        THE LITTLE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF CURRENT ENGLISH first published in 1930, 6th Edition 1986 reprinted 1988 tells its readers that:-   A SEMITE  IS A MEMBER OF ANY RACES SUPPOSEDLY DESCENDED FROM SHEM, INCLUDING JEWS AND ARABS.   It’s said that the past is another country and many scholars can be […]

Your beliefs My beliefs. Do we wear them like a coat From childhood? Do they grow with us As we stretch to the trees? Lively bright children In separate playgrounds.   Can beliefs  Be like a disease? Are your beliefs Why you hate me? Finally I see. Finally I see.   The beliefs I was […]

            I quote Britain’s SUNDAY NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR of 29th December 2024. The Sunday Times.   We live in Quare Times indeed.   In the West regimes show their strength by jailing journalists or plotting their murder. It’s a practice over a century old. In 1915 the knighted former diplomat Roger […]

And so this is 2025. Have you received the letter telling you you’ve got an OBE or an MBE or a knighthood? No? And if you did receive such a  letter, what would you do. Pat and I discuss the matter (hello again, Hugo). We also discuss the way headlines are used in newspaper articles, […]

  You may have read “SCHOOLS OF VIOLENCE, BROTHERS AND ARMS” as a Blog here a couple of years ago. It originated in the Connolly Association’s IRISH DEMOCRAT in the 1980s.   It challenged and refuted the depiction of the Irish Christian Brothers as violent Republicans. As far afield as Lahore, where Tariq Ali was […]

I’m reading at present The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. It’s fiction, showing what would happen if a  US dictator won an election and the police began targeting a minority community. Catholics/nationalists aren’t a minority in the North any more. Which is ironic, since the construction of the state down to the last twist […]

  Have you ever:-   Heard or read a condemnation of   A. The Soviet Union refusing to declare war on Germany in September 1939?   B. The United States refusing to declare war on Germany in September 1939?   C. Any country, other than Ireland, refusing to declare on Germany in September 1939?   […]

There’s a famous story about when George Washington was six years old. He received a hatchet as a gift and with it he damaged his father’s cherry tree. When his father discovered what George had done, he was pretty angry. Young George bravely said, “I cannot tell a lie…I did cut it with my hatchet.” […]