In the spring of 2020, Molly Elliott accompanied her best friend on a bus journey across Dublin. Elliott was 15 years old and the life that stretched ahead of her seemed full of possibilities. A few weeks later Covid arrived and the shutters came down. She wonders how she would have coped without music to keep her safe and sane.
Bob Stanley does not think small. His last book Yeah Yeah Yeah, published in 2013, was a mammoth 800-page work, a history of post-war pop from 1950 to the invention of iTunes. Universally acclaimed, it allowed him to add the title of pop historian to multi-hyphenate roles as film producer, label owner, vinyl collector and founder member of British indie-dance darlings Saint Etienne.
The unveiling of a bust of John Hume at the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week was the latest tribute to one of the chief architects of the peace process. On such occasions, due tribute is paid to Hume’s doggedness, or what Taoiseach Micheál Martin referred to as his “unrelenting perseverance”. The statue is partly a reminder of what has been lost.
Love Island is back. I’ve been sick for a couple of weeks, so I feel a little like Patrick Pearse’s consumptive waif, Eoghainín na nÉan, as I watch the migratory hunks return to the island for the warmer months. “At the summer’s end, when the hunks leave, I shall leave with them,” I say to my wife, and then I cough pathetically.
The music industry has always been more forgiving of controversy than Hollywood, so it is no surprise Johnny Depp’s first project after his successful defamation case against his former wife Amber Heard should be a collaboration with the veteran blues rocker Jeff Beck.
Many moons ago, in the year 2014, I worked freelance shifts writing articles for the Irish Times Books website. They ranged from diary listings of literary events to books features and author interviews, to mildly diverting, and sometimes ridiculous, clickbait Top 10s.
On the morning of June 16th, 1976 thousands of schoolchildren in Soweto, Johannesburg started a peaceful march. They shouted: “Down with Afrikaans.” Soon they ran into a police barricade and a few minutes later the apartheid state’s police started to shoot indiscriminately at the students.
Trinity College Dublin has climbed into the world’s top 100 universities, according to the latest global rankings, while most other Irish colleges have slipped down the league table.
