The rise of “Globish”–English as it is spoken by non-native speakers–is the subject of a recent article in the Financial Times. What made the piece unusually illuminating is that it cogently challenges the complacency that native English speakers have about the world’s emerging lingua franca. (In other words, in the future all we’ll have to […]
Today’s online version of the New York Times prominently featured a picture of Irish writer Anne Enright. It accompanies an article discussing how Enright’s Booker victory stoked up a bit of storm in a teacup over an article she had written in the London Review of Books about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The centre […]
This morning I was unsure whether I had really heard the phrase. Perhaps I had only imagined it being uttered on last night’s RTE news–such an absurdity seemed more likely to be coined during a particularly choppy REM pattern.But no. It was confirmed, in black-and-white, by this morning’s Irish Independent: Mr Ahern said the increases […]
Around 80 pages into Anne Enright’s The Gathering, I remarked to a friend that the experience of reading it with a heavy cold felt as enjoyable as walking up Croagh Patrick barefoot. However, just as pious pilgrims probably feel some sense of accomplishment while they gingerly massage their shredded soles after completing their climb, I […]
Valiantly overcoming a cold virus that seems to turned half the city’s populace into snivelling wrecks, I dragged my diseased carcass (perhaps the prose style of my current livre de chevet, The Gathering, is getting to me) into the city centre yesterday to see the indomitable Seymour Hersh hold forth at the Amnesty International Lecture. […]
Headline from the Torygraph: “BBC’s Jonathan Ross is sleazy, smug and crass.”
The cinematic highlight of the year for me occurred last Saturday evening, when I finally got around to watching The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s superb portrayal of a Stasi agent who, for reasons that are never really made wholly clear, risks everything to save some people from a […]
Amid the coverage of Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize win for The Gathering (which I might get around to reading), it has been mentioned that this is the second time the prize has been awarded to an Irish woman, the first being Iris Murdoch in 1978 for The Sea, The Sea.An illuminating article by Murdoch […]
During my extensive discussion of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, I mentioned how the author envisioned a new super-elite emerging from the wreckage of consensus capitalism. In such a scenario, “trickle-down” economics, first touted during the Reagan administration, amounts to creating a new servant class, scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from the top table. […]
(Continued from Tuesday.) Klein adopts the age-old yet fashionable metaphor of the “body politic” to demonstrate parallels between electric shock treatment administered to individual “patients” (and, later, torture victims) and the “shock therapy” acolytes of Friedman diagnosed as a remedy for ailing societies. Commencing to build on this slightly over-extended analogy, Klein points to how […]
