Mike Daisey admitted to stretching the truth in his monologue The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, but when tech journalists say that Daisey, as a monologist, had ‘no business’ telling the story in the first place, it begs the question who does, and are they telling it correctly?

There’s a telling moment, during Band of Skulls soundcheck – on a bitterly cold January night, in a small venue in Bologna, Italy. The three piece from Southhampton, England have been going through song parts individually and together for the best part of an hour, but something doesn’t seem quite right, at least to them [...]

International Women’s Day is at once a problematic and worthy idea; Shoe-horning half the world’s population into a day on the UN’s calendar, along with other hard-pressed categories like migratory birds (14-15 May) and world intellectual property (26th of April) should make you more than a little uneasy, as should the fact that more than [...]

Yesterday, despite a popular outcry and serious objections raised, Ireland’s Minister of State for Research and Innovation Seán Sherlock signed into law the European Union (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2012, a statutory instrument which has been described as Ireland’s version of SOPA. The background to the statute is outlined here and here. When news [...]

Imagine the closing of an entire newspaper/magazine/portal online because judges deem one simple phrase published, on one of its pages,  to be defamatory.  No need to imagine it, as it’s already happened this month – not in China, as one might think, but in the heart of the EU; Italian judges, deeming one phrase published [...]

While everyone’s getting caught up in the buzz about The Artist, I have a shameful confession to make:  silent movies have always bored the bunions off of me – as a child I gnashed my teeth in despair when Charlie Chaplin or, god forbid, Harold Lloyd came on the television. That’s not to write off [...]

First published in the journal of the University of Limerick History Society, History Studies, vol.6 (2005), pp.2-17. The small fourteenth-century Florentine panel in the Hunt Museum, Limerick, shows an image of the Crucifixion. Beside the cross the Virgin falls in a swoon, supported by one of the holy women and St John the Evangelist. At [...]

“A poem often has a moment or a movement or an image, to deal with, not a whole series or interrelated and elaborated sequences, nor that sense of duration and vicarious experience that the novel brings. The best a novel can do is use its superstructure, all those cumulative bits of housekeeping, to achieve poem-moments, [...]

While Irish and Italian citizens participated in the protests against the US SOPA / PIPA bills, it seems that their own Governments are in the process of introducing very similar measures – perhaps even harsher. The Irish government is acting  in the wake of a court case (EMI and Others Vs UPC) where record companies [...]

“When she woke, she was Red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign. She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, [...]

I remember the first time I saw Nosferatu. I was 15 and in the full throws of gothic angst – complete with importance, poetry and pianos. The dramatic German Expressionist stylings of Murnau’s Carpathian landscape, therefore, offered the ideal genre –especially when it came to an extremely teen-friendly subject…..vampires. Made in 1921 in the extremely [...]

WordPress has mushroomed in size over the last couple of years, and its estimated that 22 in every 100 new domains registered in the States are running wordpress. And it’s not only small bloggers and internet marketers running the software – they claim that 14.7% of the top million websites are using their free open [...]