LRB Winter Lectures 2020 Is it OK to have children? Lectures & discussions / Research event / 14 Feb 2020 Book LRB Winter Lectures 2020: Meehan Crist |
Category: BOOK REVIEWS
BOOKS: TRYING TO STAY AWAKE …
The alarm clock is on all-terrain wheels. If you don’t immediately turn it off, it rolls off your bedside table and cruises around the bedroom beeping and flashing until there’s nothing for it but to get out of bed and chase it. Or there’s the airborne alarm clock which takes off from its base and flies around the room making a noise like an infuriated mosquito.
BOOKS: WE CAN’T SHOVE THIS STORY INTO THE PAST
The rapid modernisation of Ireland in recent years can easily hide the shadow of our very recent past. That modernisation is most notably marked by the introduction of marriage equality, and the repeal of the eighth amendment. These referendums, passed by two-thirds of the population, would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
BOOKS: CATHERINE KELLY REVIEWS ‘THE ACTRESS’
If you watched TV in Ireland in the late 2000s, you may remember the scene: a young man tears up a piece of soil with bare, muddied hands, lifts it to his nose and inhales. “We’ll miss your cooking in Berlin,” his German partner tells the young man’s mother over the breakfast table, “but at least they have Kerrygold there too.”
BOOKS: THE SEAMUS MALLON I KNEW …
Courage and generosity: those are the two words that come to mind when I think of Seamus Mallon. Courage because for twenty-five years between the 1970s and 1990s he spoke out ceaselessly against violence from whatever quarter it came, republican or loyalist or state forces. As a result he suffered constant threats (including death threats); physical attacks on him, his family and his home; intimidation and vilification.
LET’S PRESERVE CIVILITY AND MODERATION
As Friday approaches, with its 11pm deadline when the UK officially leaves the European Union, there is a temptation to retreat into bunkers of defiance (on the part of those of us who see the move as a tragic error) or triumphalism (among those who will see their plan realised).