Jan 6Ten Films from 2021Nothing more or less than my ten favourite films, of all those that I watched in 2021. 10. Army of Shadows, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville Army of Shadows. a film by the master of suspense, Melville, is about the French Resistance during World War Two. Like Melville’s other works, it is…Movie Review14 min read
Dec 30, 2021Ten Books from 2021For better or for worse, this year I mostly read novels, and very little non-fiction, apart from a couple of biographies and memoirs. A sizeable number of these were contemporary Irish works, of mixed quality, that by and large confirmed my belief that 21st-century Irish writers still live in the…Book Review12 min read
Mar 15, 2021Film Review: “Rosie”, 2018Rosie (dir. Paddy Breathnach, 2018) Irish films can often feel constrained or obsessed by their own context. The need to distinguish Ireland from other English-speaking countries, and the desire to assert our own distinctive way of speaking and acting, can put a grey cloud over a narrative, pushing more interesting…Irish Cinema4 min read
Jan 2, 2021Fifteen Movies from 2020Despite working in a cinema for over four years, I would never have called myself a film buff. Sure, I always enjoyed movies, but my actual knowledge of great cinema was quite limited. 2020 marked a big improvement on that. Over the course of the year, I watched over one…Movie List12 min read
Jan 1, 2021Ten Books from 2020I passed the early months of 2020 lockdown reading at a considerable rate, though this dropped off somewhat after the initial relaxation of restrictions. Overall, last year I read around forty-five books — for those who read little, this is an unimaginable figure, and for those who are true bookworms…2020 Best Books9 min read
May 23, 2020Review: Normal People by Sally RooneyNote: Mild spoilers are contained below, though this is not exactly a plot-driven novel As an occasional, unpaid book reviewer, it is difficult to decide what to write about. My opinions are not of interest to many, if anyone, and of the books I have read recently, there are few…Sally Rooney8 min read
Apr 1, 2020Lying about Learning: Homeschooling in Ireland“Politics mean nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to the truth.” — Boris Pasternak, “Doctor Zhivago” DISCLAIMER: This is targeted at Irish readers. If you don’t understand the references to specific institutions, please google them, or read something else. i. I didn’t sit in a classroom…Homeschooling8 min read
Mar 28, 2020Review: The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne WestadIt may surprise you to hear this, but historians love fads. You may have thought that the guardians of knowledge about the past would be above such frivolities, but historians, just like most academics, are very susceptible to the latest intellectual trends. Whether it be social history, the cultural turn…Cold War7 min read
Mar 23, 2020Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John MandelWe bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. …Dystopia7 min read
Published in Dialogue & Discourse·Jun 18, 2019Postmodern Publicity: The Internet and the Public SphereThe name Jürgen Habermas is familiar to anyone who took a college-level course on the French Revolution, or who read a little academic literature on media studies. Habermas is a German thinker, whose work includes a broad body of material on philosophy with which I shall not pretend to be…Politics10 min read
