NEW BOOKS LAUNCHED IN BELFAST THIS MONTH

Terry Brankin loves his wife, but it’s a bloody nuisance that a cold-case investigator is trying to pin him for a long past IRA bombing that killed a young girl. His wife Kathleen can’t take it. He tells her that things were different then. She tells him he must confess. He’d only get two years under the Belfast Agreement and she’ll stand by him, but she leaves him to give him time to mull it over.

THE BRIAN WILSON COLUMN

I offer contrasting cameos to illustrate why this might be happening. Last Saturday, an indeterminate number of people splashed their way through Glasgow, waving flags. (Incidentally, should Scotland’s Education and Justice Ministers really be sharing a march with banners which denounce opponents as ‘scum’ and “c`***s’?

SEAMUS HEANEY: THE MANY STAGES OF THINKING

This discussion of Heaney’s politics and understanding of place is admirably nuanced, yet never unclear. He does full justice to Heaney’s complex understanding of “locations of writing”, places enlivened by association with literature, and his related understanding of his own home, which situates it in a broad spatial and temporal context. O

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