Bette Brown writes that Sebastian Barry’s award-winning novel, The Secret Scripture, should be read by everyone in the medical field. One might recoil from a novel set in a mental hospital in Roscommon as holiday reading. But Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture recently became my inseparable holiday companion. While at once terrifying, it is also [...]
Jack Lynch – A Biography, by Dermot Keogh (Gill and Macmillan, €26.99). Kealan Flynn writes that a new biography of Jack Lynch offers us a rare insight into how past political leaders dealt with economic difficulties. Dermot Keogh’s biography of the former Taoiseach Jack Lynch is an impressive and thoroughly researched study of one of [...]
Dr John Wallace looks at one of the great cerebral heroes of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who had a deep attachment to both medicine and Ireland Philosophers are not expected to be heroic, but two certainly are. Socrates — who was forced to commit suicide by the state — was turned into [...]
Jools Holland has spent the last 30 years meeting his musical heroes and playing with them live on TV. He has also received an OBE for his achievements as a musician, bandleader and presenter. Though now a ‘national treasure’, he first came to the public’s attention as the pianist with the punk band Squeeze. After [...]
Berna Cox on the latest cosmetic surgery trend to have your cascades and cankles perfected. For women obsessed with ‘elegant’ shoes, it’s a relatively small cost compared to the shoes themselves. Thankfully, I’m happy with my cascade. What a relief. Given that I didn’t know what it was or that it even had a name, [...]
Berna Cox ends up with helmet hair and stripey legs after a three-day ‘pampering’ session and decides that with all the stress, time and money involved, it’s just not worth the hassle I don’t think I’m a very good girl. What I mean is, I don’t think I’m too good at being a girl. I [...]
Dr John Wallace looks at the early years of women’s participation in third-level education in Trinity College Dublin, when women were perceived as being ‘a danger to the men’ A book called A Danger to the Men?, edited by Susan Parkes, looks at the struggles and the achievements of women in third-level education in Ireland. [...]
Berna Cox writes that although society finds it acceptable when a widower remarries, it’s a different story when a woman marries again — but she doesn’t intend on going anywhere for quite a while. Recently, I met a woman from my home town and all but took her hostage for a few hours to catch [...]
Eighty years later, the number of cafés multiplied and they were often used by the leaders of the Revolution, such as Danton and Robespierre. Indeed, it was the chefs of those aristocrats who lost their heads who set up many of the great restaurants and bistros of Paris. The 1800s marked the age of the [...]
Terence Cosgrave recommends a new book on the history and archaeology behind Newgrange, Ireland’s finest historical site. It’s rare that an academic book retains its scholarship, while also being a page-turning read. Most academic books that have a high degree of scholarship tend to be written by and for academics, and those with a deep [...]
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