www.fgks.org   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

| 5.8°C Dublin

Books

November 2022

Man of action: Erskine Childers in the British army. Photo by Hulton Archive via Getty Man of action: Erskine Childers in the British army. Photo by Hulton Archive via Getty Gallery

Erskine Childers’ life was stranger than his fiction: From British army soldier to Asgard gun-runner

No novelist gets close to Erskine Childers when it comes to living the life of the books. Ian Fleming and John le Carré may have worked as intelligence agents before using their protagonists, James Bond and George Smiley, to play out their fantasies, but Childers first invented the modern spy thriller, then spent the rest of his turbulent life trying to outdo the adventures of his own creation. Executed by firing squad in Dublin 100 years ago this month, to the very end he exhibited the cool, upper-class insouciance of the character he so desperately wanted to become.

Bob Dylan has always had a way with words. Photo: Kevin Winter Bob Dylan has always had a way with words. Photo: Kevin Winter Gallery

Premium

Bob Dylan’s new essay collection paints him as a misanthropic, cranky old man with views that would get anyone else cancelled

He worked in a travelling carnival off and on for six years after dropping out of school. His next employment was as a sex worker in uptown Manhattan where sometimes he’d earn “one hundred a night, really, from four in the afternoon until three or four in the morning,” he said in an interview in the mid-1960s. “I almost got killed.“ In 1966, he was almost killed in a motorcycle accident that made him disappear from public life. He also had a heroin habit in New York.

Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These runs to just 116 pages. Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These runs to just 116 pages. Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images Gallery

Premium

Too long, didn’t read: why the short novel is making a comeback

Last year, I deleted social media apps from my phone. All those five minutes here, 10 minutes there, were accumulating into too much time wasted faffing about online. I went back to carrying a book in my bag instead, which I hadn’t done in years. But the novels in my reading pile at the time — looking at you, Kate Atkinson and Paul Auster — were too heavy to lug around, so I put together a bag-friendly stash, mainly second-hand vintage Penguins such as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Since then, I tend to have two books on the go at once. Shorties go out, tomes stay home.

Smouldering anger: Gavin McCrea. Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Smouldering anger: Gavin McCrea. Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Gallery

Cells by Gavin McCrea: Heaven knows he’s miserable now

There is a point, very late on in Gavin McCrea’s new memoir Cells, when the author places his brother, named in the book as N, under the psychoanalytical microscope. N’s “expenditure of anger and malice seemed to be in no proper relation to the subject itself”, McCrea writes. “Not even grief could explain the magnitude of his rage. The smaller the cause, it seemed, the larger the explosion… suggesting the whole bulk of his fury had already been present to begin with; only by chance did it settle on one matter or another as a pretext for breaking out.”

Showing 1 - 30 of 13002 results

Privacy