Flannery and Dante – a poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
At The Other Journal I come across this poem “riffing on Flannery O’Connor’s fandom for Dante” as the site itself puts it: Flannery and Dante For my money Dante is about as…
Category: rogues
Jarod Gott on Tinder, writing and the presentation of the self
Recently I was at Dreams, Hallucinations and the Imagination, a conference organised by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience. Dreams and like experiences are an interest…
Gizella Bodnár AKA “Airplane Gizi” RIP
Gizella Bodnár has died. No, I hadn’t heard of her either until I came across her via Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page. Hungary’s “Queen of Thieves”, she also earned the name…
Ian Parker in The New Yorker on Dan Mallory’s life of deception
There’s an enthralling piece in the Feb 11th New Yorker on the suspense novelist Dan Mallory who has published as A J Finn. Turns out he chose a pseudonym for…
Geoffrey Langlands RIP: major, Dieppe Raid survivor, educationalist, 97 year old coup leader
I had never heard of Geoffrey Langlands, who has died in Lahore aged 101, until coming across his death on Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page. His Wikipedia page has been subjected to a…
Was Charles Hughesdon the last surviving eyewitness of Michael Collins’ funeral?
A few years ago I came across this obituary in the Daily Telegraph. It seems a little parochial to wonder if, in the midst of a busy and incident-packed life,…
Everyone loves a rogue
Messing around with WordPress’s “Pages” feature, I have created a page devoted to my posts on “rogues” (broadly defined … probably I should just say “eccentrics”) Anyway, here it is
“the culture of the Mechanics’ Institute”
Reading John Buchan’s “The Island of Sheep”, the last of (and the best of) the Richard Hannay novels, I came across this arresting passage (spoken by Sandy Arbuthnot on his…
Séamus Sweeney 