A few years late but The Improbability of Love by Hannah Mary Rothschild is a good yarn set in the centre of London’s art world. The book opens at the art sale of the century — The Improbability of Love, a long lost masterpiece by Antoine Watteau, the celebrated 18th-century French artist — as the…
Many years ago, I was involved with WordPlay, a collective of writers, actors, and directors, in the Wexford Arts Centre in the Southeast of Ireland where I live. Based on feedback from a staged reading of a full-length play ‘Broken’, I was encouraged to develop what I had originally thought was a minor character into…
Having won the 2015 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and shortlisted for several more — 2015 Man Booker Prize, 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award — I invested many hours into reading Hanya Yanagihara’s 700+ page ‘A Little Life’. I would…
For some reason or another, I’ve watched two films recently featuring climbers attempting ascents of El Capitan (El Cap for those in the know) in Yosemite National Park. I might add immediately that I’ve no interest in climbing. In The Dawn Wall, we meet accomplished climber Tommy Caldwell who, after a series of personal traumas,…
An analysis of that Screen Time App on your smartphone can be quite worrying, all those minutes and hours of time scrolling aimlessly on social with so little to show for it. I’m trying to make my screen time translate into something more productive or at the very least provocative. Next time you find yourself…
I fell for the press release and dutifully lured a crew of our art writers to visit Art in the Garden in Russborough House to see the largest assembly of works by Salvador Dalí ever to be staged in Ireland. The collection comprised of large outdoor pieces presented outside the front of the mansion and…
I’ve always been fascinated with dystopian literature and science fiction movies from Blade Runner, Fahrenheit 451, Logan’s Run to Terminator. Hulu’s reboot of the 1985 novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood put me back on the dystopian literature trail and I finally got round to Brave New World recently. Here are my thoughts: Brave…
We all know the line, “Behind every great man is a great woman”, well here’s the story of unassuming Joan Castleman (Glenn Close) as she travels to Stockholm to see her gregarious husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Based on Meg Wolitzer’s novel of the same title, I’m told she was meticulous with…
Fiction is my thing probably because I don’t ‘do‘ realism. I’ve read a few biographies over the years, mainly about writers, artists or actors and their journey to stardom, oblivion, wealth, addiction, obsession, madness and so on and often a nasty combination of all of the above. I have noticed that books labouring over one’s…
