Daniel Kalder on Cold War Armageddon
Children of the 1980s recall the pervasive atmosphere of imminent nuclear devastation which we somehow survived. Not unlike Daniel Kalder with the naval base warning siren, I found that the…
Category: the world of childhood
Great facts-of-life scenes: Elizabeth Taylor, “At Mrs Lippincote’s”
I read somewhere that someone (bear with me) explained the facts of life to their son by reading them a chapter of Richard Llewellyn’s “How Green Was MY Valley” wherein…
Dylan Thomas, Poem in October, read by Dylan Thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water…
You can’t look after others if you are dead: Blogging the Octonauts – Manatees, S2, E19.
Having three children under 10, a reasonable proportion of my time is spent watching children’s programmes. While I have of late been damning the notion that there is such thing…
Orcs and Oulipo – TLS piece by Peter Hoskin on Fighting Fantasy
There’s an affectionate piece on Fighting Fantasy books on the TLS website by Peter Hoskin (I am not sure if “TLS Online” means it will not appear in the print…
“it is astonishing that each morning we wake up sane – that is, relatively sane -after having passed through that zone of shades, those labyrinths of dreams”
Lately I’ve been rereading psychology books, and have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as…
“A culture is no better than its woods” – W H Auden, “Bucolics”
(Edit 22nd August 2018 – welcome if you have come here by Googling “a culture is no better than its woods”, you may also be interested in this post about…
Elegy of Fortinbras, Zbigniew Herbert
Years ago, I read Zbigniew Herbert’s wonderful “Elegy of Fortinbras.” I studied “Hamlet” for the Leaving Cert. Brendan McWilliams somewhere wrote that he had a pet theory that the Shakespearean…
Séamus Sweeney 