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  • The stolen generation (Part 1)

    Seventeen-year-old Phyllis Bin Barka was cleaning a hospital floor in Derby, Western Australia, when she was told she had a visitor. Confused and not a little scared, she went outside. An Aboriginal woman sitting in a battered pickup inspected her briefly. "That's not my daughter," she said. That was about 40 years ago. Phyllis never saw her mother again. Phyllis Bin Barka was one of an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and brought up in institutions because they were, in the terminology of the day, half-caste. p

  • The stolen generation (Part 2)

    `I must say, they were very good towards us', recalls Phyllis Bin Barka, who grew up in the Holy Child orphanage established by the John of God nuns in Broome in the 1940s. "They didn't have much but they tried to give us what they could. They taught us a lot - how to sew, be clean within ourselves, look after your own children." p

  • Travel Log

    The greatest free show in Britain has opened again - Blackpool Illuminations. Running from now until November 5th, the Illuminations, which stretch for six miles along the promenade, were turned on by our very own boys, Westlife. . The Pleasure Beach has more than 145 rides, including the new Valhalla - a six-minute journey, part water, part roller coaster, which bombards the senses. Every night there is a wide selection of shows to attend, and overall Blackpool is very inexpensive. Getting to Blackpool is easy, with direct flights from Dublin every day, or take a package with Irish Ferries or Stena Line. You can see what's on in Blackpool on www.blackpooltourism.com. p
WINGING IT

  • Dark side of the fame machine

    If ever there were a lesson in the cruel nature of fame, then last weekend was it. On Friday, more people tuned into Big Brother to discover whether Darren, Craig or Anna would walk away with the cash than watched the Olympics opening ceremony. Then on Sunday, we woke up to the news that Paula Yates had been found dead in her London apartment, having taken her own life by accident or design. There's a curious symmetry to the two events; Big Brother was all about 11 people wanting to be famous, and Paula Yates's death was a sobering lesson in what can happen when that wish comes true. p
HIGHBROW/LOWBROWBack to Top

  • Mozart vs Motown

    `Dumbing down" has become shorthand for a miscellany of alleged failings, but central to the argument is the battle between the traditional arts and popular culture, between art as a pursuit fully appreciated only by a select band of initiates and culture as an expression and reflection of the talents of a very large number of people. This is more often to do with the subject than with the treatment of the subject: ie, all symphonies worthwhile, all pop music pap. It reaches a higher lunacy when otherwise unremarkable people declare that they do not watch television (fair enough) but in terms that make it clear that they are thereby awarding themselves a first-class honours degree. Theatre good, television bad. p
QUIDNUNCBack to Top

  • Look back with humour

    Junior minister Mary Hanafin and her father, Senator Des Hanafin, at his 70th birthday party in the Anner Hotel, Thurles, last Sunday. p

  • All hands across the water

    Expect a flurry of British-Irish activity over the next few weeks with Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, David Trimble, Seamus Mallon and the first ministers of Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles all coming to the Republic for various high-level meetings. p

  • Desmond's final words

    There is much interest in the forthcoming book from the outspoken Labour politician Barry Desmond. Desmond is 65 and recently retired after six years as our member on the EU Court of Auditors in Luxembourg, the post now held by Maire Geoghegan-Quinn. p

  • Chinese whispers

    The official opening of our consulate in Shanghai last week did not go as smoothly as was portrayed on this side of the world. An email from China has reached Quidnunc with the heading "Isn't Ireland supposed to be a rich country now?" It tells of how some mischievous individual acquired the guest list of the new consul general Geoffrey Keating, registered his address and contacted all the Irish who had been invited to the morning ceremony, as opposed to the international evening reception. After detailing the time and location, the invitation continued: "We feel that it would be a nice gesture if we were to hold a casual breakfast immediately following the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the Shanghai Centre on the same morning and I would be obliged it you could bring a plate with you." It suggested that women bring a fruit plate and men bring along the rest of the breakfast. p

  • Getting shirty with Mandy

    Paddy Teahon, until this spring the secretary general at the Department of the Taoiseach, comes in for mention in the revised edition of Donald Macintyre's biography, Mandelson and the Making of New Labour, which is just out. Last February, as Dublin made frantic efforts to persuade Peter Mandelson not to suspend the new Northern Ireland executive in the face of David Trimble's threat to resign over the lack of progress on IRA decommissioning, relations between Dublin and Tony Blair were the worst ever. British officials were trying to dissuade their counterparts in Dublin and Washington from suggesting that the institutions could be miraculously revived on the basis of de Chastelain's second report and Bertie Ahern was trying to persuade Blair to state he now intended to go back to Parliament to rescind suspension. It would have been a "hopelessly over-positive" statement and Blair stood firm. p

  • Tarzan here, Janey!

    Our hard-pressed accountants, who are both witnesses at and subjects of various tribunals and inquiries investigating financial goingson over the past 20 years, will no doubt rush to hear the author of Life in the Jungle when he addresses the annual conference of the Institute of Chartered Accountants on Wednesday. Britain's flamboyant former cabinet minister Michael Heseltine - aka Tarzan - is the after-dinner speaker in the O'Reilly Hall in UCD and while his subject is politics he knows a thing or two about accountancy too - he made his fortune before heading for parliament - and is renowned as one of the best and most dramatic speakers at Westminster. Two hundred will turn up to hear his wit and wisdom. p

  • Surveying Sydney

    James McDaid isn't our only Minister at the Sydney Olympics this week. The OPW's Martin Cullen is there with three officials and is managing to keep out of the headlines and to avoid squabbling with Pat Hickey and the OCI. Cullen's role is to view the renowned Olympic stadium on behalf of Bertie Ahern who plans to build his own £500 million national stadium in north west Dublin. The Minister told Quidnunc from Sydney that he will get to the games two times at the invitation of his Australian counterpart but what he is really doing is viewing the stadium in action, in particular the aquatic facilities for our hosting of the Para Olympics in 2003, and meeting project managers and ministers. p
CINEMA VERITEBack to Top

  • Girl in the red coat

    Roma Ligocka's first sentence was: "I want to die with my mother." Death was nothing special for the three-year-old, nor for any other of the Jews forced by the Nazis to live in the Kracow Ghetto. She felt nothing when her aunt was shot dead before her eyes and saw nothing remarkable in the bodies lying on the street half-buried in the snow. p
FILM FESTIVALBack to Top

  • Green on the screen

    Atr one point in When Brendan Met Trudy, the exuberant Irish romantic comedy written by Roddy Doyle and directed by Kieron J. Walsh, Doyle takes a well-aimed dig at the self-congratulatory nature of modern Ireland. RTE newscaster Anne Cassin is perfectly deadpan as she reels off the headlines on a spoof TV news bulletin: the Irish economy continues to boom, an Irish pop group tops the UK charts, and a United Nations man relates how much he loves Ireland. p
BRIGHT STARBack to Top

  • Looking up after `I Went Down'

    One of Ireland's brightest and most prolific young actors, Peter McDonald found his vocation in life 10 years ago when he went to UCD to study English and became consumed with acting in the college dramatic society. It was on a stage at UCD that he met Conor McPherson, who became a close friend, and they have worked together many times since, on stage, in the movie of McPherson's first screenplay, I Went Down, and now in McPherson's first film as writer and director, Saltwater. p
LETTERFRACK SESSIONBack to Top

  • A crowning jewel

    Connemara on a misty September morning is magical. At Maam Cross the mountains soar upwards into brooding clouds, back-lit by occasional swooping washes of sunshine: it could be the Himalayas. Unfortunately this early-autumn combination of dampness and warmth is ideal midge weather - and at the foot of Diamond Mountain in Letterfrack, the pesky insects are out in force. In a deep bay window in the hallway of the Old Monastery Hostel a tiny figure in a woolly hat holds a cup of coffee in one hand while swatting crossly with the other. Then she looks up and grins, and there is no mistaking Sharon Shannon, accordionist extraordinaire. p
COMEDYBack to Top

  • Welcome to the Hall of Fame

    The night Rich Hall won this year's Perrier comedy award for his show in which he plays a prisoner, he found himself in a real prison. Shortly after winning the prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he heard that his friend, and everyone's favourite avant-garde performance comic, The League Against Tedium (aka Simon Munnery), had fallen foul of the local police and was being held in a prison cell overnight. Hall left the glitzy Perrier party to go and see his friend but later returned to thrill one and all with a stirring rendition of Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days from the stage. It was that sort of night. p
REEL NEWSBack to Top

  • Trawling for mystic nuggets

    Returning to his Toronto home after chairing the jury for first-time feature-film makers at the Venice festival, Atom Egoyan declared: "The entire film industry is suffering from what you might call the Pax Americana. Films like Pulp Fiction have changed and homogenised the practice of making movies. The production of images on this continent has become incredibly uniform and casual. Independent film-making now is just another version of the American Dream: Get a camera, digital film and an AVID editing suite, and you can strike gold. Maybe you'll find that mystic nugget." p
IMPRESARIOBack to Top

  • Change of tactics

    It's not often that a "pop" journalist seeks a private audience with a Lord. But this, my right Honourable readers of the Irish Times, is precisely what happens only hours before the first preview of The Beautiful Game, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, which is set in Ireland. Sorry, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber. Or "The Lord Lloyd-Webber" to cull a line from his personal notepaper. Come to think of it, it's not often a British Lord pens music for a drama that deals, even peripherally, with the situation in Northern Ireland. But that we'll get to later. p
THE INDEFINITE ARTICLEBack to Top

  • Happy birthdays, Mr Armstrong

    This year is, sort of, the centennial year of Louis Daniel Armstrong. The doubt concerns the long held belief that Satchmo was born on the Fourth of July, 1900 - a date now widely thought to have been cooked up between himself and his manager, Joe Glaser. The actual date of birth, it seems, was August 4th, 1901, which suggests, with some justification, that the Armstrong centennial celebrations might conceivably last into 2001. p
TV REVIEWBack to TopRADIO REVIEWBack to Top

  • The curious case of the missing station

    Call it the curse of the radio column. No sooner had half this space turned all soft and gooey last week with praise for BBC Radio 5 Live than a significant portion of the station's Irish listenership lost access to it entirely. p
LITERARY CRITICISMBack to Top

  • Fabulists, realists and the aesthetics of exile

    This collection addresses a large gap in the current critical literature; its discussion of non-canonical topics is especially welcome. There are, of course, risks in approaching contemporary material: the bewildering array of writers on the scene means exclusions, and there is the extreme difficulty of second-guessing posterity as to how lasting the work one has chosen to discuss will be. Nevertheless the introduction is a bit tight-lipped when it comes to offering judgments, aesthetically or ideologically or both; the energy of the individual essays finds only curiously muted echoes here, which leaves the impression of a whole somewhat less than the sum of its parts. p
CLASSICSBack to Top

  • Comedy with a cut-glass sparkle

    In a darkening world, Everyman Library is an abiding light. Since 1906 Everyman has been producing classic texts in stylish, enduring and inexpensive editions. With its takeover and revamping in 1990 by David Campbell Publishers, the house took on new life, with a complete overhaul of design, so that by now the Everyman Library has become a repository of many of the greatest works of international literature. p
IRISH HISTORYBack to Top

  • Big topic, big book

    Tim Pat Coogan is an internationally respected journalist. Since his departure as editor of the Irish Press, he has become better known as a prolific historian who is among the most widely read in this country and abroad. His biographies of Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins have enjoyed wide success, while his work on the IRA and on the Northern "Troubles" can be found in bookshops all over the world. When he published Ireland Since the Rising in the 1960s, he was one of the first historians to tackle systematically the history of the Irish State. p
MOVIESBack to Top

  • Hero in pursuit of himself

    If Cyril Connolly had ever heard of Burt Lancaster, he might have been moved to say that within him there was a thin actor wildly signalling to be let out. To begin with, Lancaster paid his dues with muscular roles in The Flame and the Arrow, The Crimson Pi- rate and Trapeze, in which his logos were what he called "the grin" and a curious gesture with his hands that was not unlike a magician's "Hey, presto!" Then, when he obtained quite another kind of muscle, he went after what he called "stretch" parts, and it was his magnificent physique that let him down. p
FICTIONBack to Top

  • Tale of two bruised characters

    Clara is, as she says with heavy irony, "post-operative". Her pain is obviously emotional as well as physical, and she seems to be in the process of assessing her situation. Quickly and with much barbed humour - "by the way you may have noticed that I am having problems with some of the upper-case Is. I'm sorry about this. It has happened to me since my operation and I think has something to do with loss of self-esteem." - she supplies the details of her life, including her mother's ritual of making jam and baking. "I am by way of being the cosmopolitan one in the family." p

  • Death down the centuries

    Fronted by a 256-year-old narrator, Matthieu Zela, a man who has had "nineteen wives and nine hundred lovers", The Thief of Time signals from the outset its post-modernist intent. It is a highly self-reflexive work in which issues of representation and fiction-making are very much to the fore. Simultaneously as he attempts to lend his novel the illusion of substance by peppering the text with the names of historical celebrities, he exposes its fictionality through allusions to such novels as Vanity Fair, A Farewell to Arms and The Scarlet Letter, and by references to film. p
LOOSE LEAVESBack to Top

  • Echoes from the corridors of power

    Between Andrew Rawnsley's exposes about Tony Blair and British Chancellor Gordon Brown in his new book Servants of the People and revelations about Peter Mandelson in the updated edition of Donald Macintyre's Mandelson and the Making of New Labour, the British are spoiled these days with titbits about what goes on in their corridors of power. Here, such information is thinner on the ground, but there are some political tomes in the offing. Early next month sees publication of Noel Browne: Passionate Out- sider from Gill and Macmillan, who promise that author John Horgan will explore what they call the tantalising gaps in Browne's autobiography Against the Tide . . . It's fitting somehow that, following John Cooney's biography of Browne's old adversary John Charles McQuaid, there's going to be another reassessment of the complex mastermind of the Mother and Child Scheme. Junkies of that fascinating era in Irish political life will enjoy comparing and contrasting the two books. Also next month, New Island Books will publish a political memoir by Labour's Barry Desmond called Finally and In Conclusion, which looks back on 30 years in politics. It's hard to imagine it being too controversial, but no doubt there are plenty of players in Leinster House right now who'll have tales to tell the minute they're out of office, and Sadbh only hopes Irish publishers are quietly signing them up now for long, meaty reads in the years ahead. p
LOCAL HISTORYBack to Top

  • A most troublesome county

    The Aftermath of Revolution. Sligo 1921-23. By Michael Farry. University College Dublin Press. £39.95 hbk/£16.95 pbk p
LITERARY LANDMARKSBack to Top

  • Window on the woods

    It's all about the view: Robert Frost bought a simple clapboard house on Ridge Road, a mile outside Franconia, New Hampshire, because he loved the view. From the porch of the house now known as The Frost Place, a museum and centre for poetry since 1976, you can see miles of undulating forest that flows all the way to the famous White Mountains and Frost's favourite peak, Lafayette. p
PUBLISHINGBack to Top

  • Deutsch courage

    `It is possible that I am the only person in England who remembers Alfred Chester and his books . . . the most remarkable person I met through publishing," writes Diana Athill in her memoir of a life spent among authors and typescripts. She's probably right about Chester, but the posthumous readership of this eccentric, bewigged American author will certainly swell as a result of her account of their friendship, his struggle with mental illness, and his writing: "too strange to attract a large readership". p
LINGUISTICSBack to Top

  • Communication meltdown

    This splendid and disturbing book began as a series of lectures on "Endangered Languages: Causes and Consequences" presented by its co-authors at the University of Oxford two years ago. Daniel Nettle is an anthropologist; Suzanne Romaine is a linguist; their story is a depressing one of cultural and linguistic meltdown in progress all over the world. p
CULTUREBack to Top

  • Sonata in the key of `P'

    Pianos are the forgotten instruments of the 21st century. Too big to fit into the average two-bedroomed townhouse, too noisy to practise in the intimate sound-world of a semi-d, the once-ubiquitous piano has been overtaken in recent decades by the electronic gadgetry of an impatient era. Children who would once have laboured over Czerny studies now spend their evenings channel-hopping via remote control; fingers which would once have ached from arpeggios now double-click to beat the band as they surf the Net with effortless ease. Maybe this is progress - many reluctant piano students would certainly say so - but if you're a lapsed pianist who occasionally, secretly, hankers after the good old days when a generous proportion of your leisure time was devoted to Beethoven bagatelles and Brahms waltzes, this elegant little book will bring you right back there before you can say "An American in Paris". p
THE PIANOBack to Top

  • Heroes and Virginals

    Of all the pianos described here my favourite is the convertible bedroom piano (American, 1866). You sleep attached to it. Ideal. The Austrian/German "Giraffe " piano is good because it looks like one, and I quite like the English "Upright grand Pianoforte in the form of a book-case" (1795), with shelving for busts of Roman heroes and other things. p
PAPERBACKSBack to Top

  • A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle (Vintage, £6.99 in UK)

    In the first volume of what he promises will be a trilogy called The Last Roundup, Roddy Doyle unpicks the stitches of the tatty, fragile and occasionally rather lurid fabric of modern Ireland. A retelling of the 1916 Rising and its aftermath, A Star Called Henry is itself a work of weft and weave; a curious blend of pop - the narrator/protagonist, Henry Smart, has the looks of a Mills & Boon macho man and the viciousness of a Mario Puzo mafioso - and gratuitous Paddywhackery - witness the description of a blameless cup of buttermilk as "old cow piss that would make you sick to your stomach". Doyle hasn't lost his gift for striking imagery - here's Henry on his granny: "Wrapped in her sweating black shawl, she could have crept out of any century" - and the poverty of turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin is all too well described, but the book (especially in its latter stages with the handsome hero pedalling around Ireland, a terrorist on a pushbike) hovers uneasily between its largely rural milieux and a dawning urban sensibility. But then so, until very recently, did Ireland. The second and third volumes may well reveal the apparent awkwardness of A Star Called Henry as a deliberate ploy. p

  • Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley & Byron, by Edward Trelawny (Robinson, £7.99 in UK)

    If you think outrageous the doings of present-day pop stars and celebrities, cast an eye over this swashbuckling account of what David Crane in his introduction calls the "Gotterdammerung [sic] of English Romanticism" that began - or ended? - with the drowning of Shelley in the Gulf of Genoa in July 1822. The chronicler of this twilight of the gods, Edward Trelawny, is one of those figures a novelist would not dare to invent. He was born in London in 1792, the same year as Shelley, was put into the navy at the age of 13, and spent seven frustrated years as a midshipman, before being wounded in 1812. Thereafter he reinvented himself and his past, turning himself into a Byronic hero and adventurer. He fell in with the Shelley/Byron menage at Pisa, adoring the former and despising, though also emulating, the latter. He was the one who set light to Shelley's funeral pyre on the beach near Viareggio, and later would follow in Byron's fighting steps in Greece. Last Days is a wonderful yarn, the flavour of which will be enhanced by the occasional pinch of salt. p

  • Rembrandt's Eyes, by Simon Schama (Penguin, £18.99 in UK)

    Simon Schama is primarily a historian, not an art pundit, and it was probably his research into the Dutch 17th century which led him to the central personality of Rembrandt van Rijn. The son of a miller, Rembrandt aimed high and rose high, though without quite becoming the kind of painter-prince represented by Rubens - who, so Schama thinks, was his real inspiration and envy. Though certain respected older scholars have cocked a snook, Schama seems perfectly at home in art of the Baroque Age and in the bourgeois, competitive, highly commercial world of Amsterdam in its golden era. However, the density of the research and the rather stop-go quality of the narrative make it, at times, slightly ponderous to read. Nevertheless, an important book in more senses than a purely art-historical one. p

  • Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, by Lawrence Durrell (Faber & Faber, £6.99 in UK)

    One of a number of Durrell reissues, this book's elegiac reconstruction of 1950s Cyprus blends a painter's eye for light and landscape with a novelist's feel for character, pace and dialogue. If you're seeking an unbiased overview or even an explanation of Cypriot basics, you'll need to go elsewhere; Durrell is steeped in Greek culture, and his constant (and apparently casual) application of negative imagery to the Turkish side of the equation is quite shocking, while if you don't know that Enosis is the Greek Cypriot aspiration to union with Greece, he certainly won't tell you. What he's really good on, though, is the paralysing stasis of the British colonial administration, whose bumbling bureaucrats he decimates with languid ease. "They must have read my letters with knotted brows in London for there was not one which did not appeal for something to be sent to me by air. By air! I might as well have addressed love-letters to the Dalai Lama . . . " Today's overheated travel writers could learn a great deal from Durrell's consummately stylish approach. p

  • Vertigo, by W.G. Sebald (Harvill, £6.99 in UK)

    Originally published in Germany in 1990, this is the first of the remarkable part-philosophical travelogue, part-fiction narratives of a truly great writer. Sebald, author of The Emigrants (1993 Frankfurt; 1996 London) and The Rings of Saturn (1995 Frankfurt; 1998 London) is an original with a vision shaped by the European intellectual tradition, his dazzling originality and visual sense. Less seamlessly random than his later books, Vertigo is composed of four distinct movements, moving from the adventures of the young Stendhal as a soldier in Napoleon's army, to the narrator's chance criss-crossing of the trail of a pair of serial killers, to a point where the second and third sequences merge through the ghost of Franz Kafka. The fourth section brings the displaced narrator through southern Germany, to his native Bavarian village and scenes from his childhood. Few writers possess the grace, artistry and laconic tone of this wonderful thinker. Though not matching the magnificence of The Rings of Sat- urn, Vertigo is another imaginative, elegiac odyssey through landscape, history, memory, war, the limitations of life and the relentlessness of death. p

  • Stiffed: the Betrayal of Modern Man, by Susan Faludi (Vintage, £8.99 in UK)

    Men are victims of cultural forces - like 1950s housewives, men in late 20th-century America are powerless, lacking a fulfilling role, respect and freedom, argues feminist Susan Faludi, author of Backlash. The media-labelled "masculinity crisis" as expressed by increased violence, depression and suicide, is not caused by something men are doing, concludes Faludi, after six years of interviewing males, from Christian Promise Keepers to porn actors, football fans to war veterans. In this fascinating insight into what men really think - and how important fathers really are - she argues that the key question is not why men oppose women's equality, but why men don't liberate themselves from their culturally imposed bondage. p
DANCEBack to Top

  • Boxing clever

    After their successful US debut at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Massachusetts, with Ballads, CoisCeim are back with their third production this year. It is part of the Dublin Fringe Festival, but will run on until 14th October. Artistic director David Bolger has teamed up with African-American performer Sean Jeremy Palmer, who was in the cast of the American tour of Martin Guerre, the Cameron Mackintosh musical choreographed to great acclaim by Bolger. Boxes is a breezy and humorous duet examining cardboard and the box-like nature of our lives and it has been deliberately created for the small, intimate black box space of the Players Theatre in Trinity College. The lighting was designed by Eamon Fox and sound by Jim Eadie. p
THE IRISH TIMES SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE BEST ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT FOR THE WEEKaheadBack to Top

  • Cinema

    One of the most popular discoveries at Cannes this year, Billy Elliot is set in a Durham village during the miners' strike in 1983. It features a remarkable young newcomer, Jamie Bell (above), as an 11-year-old schoolboy who incurs the wrath of his widowed father (Gary Lewis), a striking miner, when he switches from boxing to ballet lessons. Julie Walters features as the boy's ballet teacher in this delightful movie which marks an auspicious cinema debut for the renowned London and Broadway theatre director, Stephen Daldry. It opens countrywide on Friday. p

  • Jazz

    As the ESB Dublin Jazz Week enters its final two days, what is still to come may well be among the most searching jazz of the week. Central to it is one of the music's finest living saxophonists, Joe Lovano. He plays tonight with the Guilfoyle-Nielsen-Guilfoyle Trio at Vicar Street. Sharing the bill with them there is an outstanding European quartet in Dutch trumpeter Eric Vloiemans, supported by a Finnish rhythm section led by the acclaimed pianist, Jarmo Savolainen. Lovano will also solo at the NCH tomorrow with the RTECO, conducted by Jim McNeely; also at the concert will be singer Kristina Fuchs and pianist and composer Floria Ross. p

  • Classical

    Belfast's Waterfront Hall is stretching a point in its Celtic Circle orchestral series by including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. But the embedded point, that there's very little in the way of orchestral visits from those foreign orchestras closest to Irish soil, is well made. The series opens tomorrow with a concert by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under its conductor emeritus, Walter Weller (right), a one-time leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, and said to be the only living conductor featured on a bank note (in Scotland, of course). He conducts a popular programme of Smetana (the symphonic poem Vltava), Elgar (the Cello Concerto, with Boris Pergamenshikov as soloist), and Tchaikovsky (the Fourth Symphony). The remaining concerts are by the Ulster Orchestra (at the opening of the Belfast Festival in October), the National Symphony Orchestra (in February), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (in April), and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (in May) p

  • Theatre

    In the maelstrom that is the Dublin Fringe Festival, a few shows stand out in the programme as being, to coin a phrase, mainstream material. Writer Gavin Kostick has been steadily impressing himself on the theatre scene in recent years, as has the company Calypso Productions, which has assembled a strong team to create his new play Asylum Ball. p

  • Trad

    If you hadn't come across Music Under the Mountains before, pencil this burgeoning Wicklow Festival next weekend into your increasingly cluttered calendar of Irish traditional music. Electing to kicking off with the seasons of mists and early chills, it's only an ass's roar from the big smoke, while the line-up this year which includes the Chieftains, Dervish, Kila (above), Lia Luachra, Voice Squaddy Phil Callery and box-player Josephine Marsh, is damn sure to ignite torch-sessions throughout all townlands surrounding the village of Hollywood. The patriotic cause that draws the support of such altruistic luminaries is the local Laura Greaves Music Bursary, which feeds into the local loose-limbed trad academy in Hollywood National School - just to ensure that there'll be lots of Wicklow music pouring out of our ears in 20 years time. p
ROCKBack to Top

  • That 'ol Van magic

    What with Lou Reed and Bob Dylan performing in Dublin over the past couple of weeks, it's now Van Morrison's turn to try to switch on the elusive magic. His dates at Dublin's Olympia theatre next Monday and Tuesday, are on the back of the recently-released duet album, You Win Again, where he teams up with Linda Gail Lewis, sister of recalcitrant rock'n'roller Jerry Lee. p
CD CHOICEBack to Top

  • Rock/Pop

    Madonna: Music (Maverick/Warner Bros) p

  • Roots/Trad

    Ruben Gonzalez: Chanchullo (World Circuit) p

  • Electronic

    Roger Doyle: Fairlight Memories (Silver Door Records) p
EATING INBack to Top

  • A personal touch

    You might imagine that it is notoriety which has made Gordon Ramsay one of the best-known chefs in these islands. The controversial television series, the volatile behaviour, the scrambling after culinary stars and the public spats with critics and former chums have certainly kept Ramsay in the tabloids. p

  • Cherry Soup with Caramel Balsamic Ice Cream

    300g dark red cherries, stoned p
GETTING OUTBack to Top

  • At least we had the last laugh

    Eating out has become the Celtic cub's favourite pastime and every week sees new restaurants opening up to knock last week's darling off the top spot. Moe's has been hailed as this month's haunt of the hippest, even displaying its wares on its website www.moesdublin.com. One work colleague raved about her time there, and was fair drooling at the mere memory of her meal. p
WINEBack to Top

  • Olympian tipples from Oz

    If you find yourself watching the Olympics with a glass of wine, raise a toast to the host country. We probably wouldn't be casually tippling in front of the telly at all if it weren't for Australia. The Aussies knocked all the starch out of wine, kicking the uppercrust snobbery and the special occasion awe of it to smithereens. They made it easy and everyday. No complicated region and estate names - it was just plain Chardonnay, Cabernet or Shiraz, mate, and it didn't cost much and was dangerously easy to drink. p

  • Ten Regions To Remember

    Barossa Valley (South Australia) - unrivalled for meaty, old-style Shiraz p

  • A Tasting Tour

    White p

  • Tasting At The Top

    If you're interested in pursuing Australia's finest wines, have a look at Langton's Classification of Distinguished Australian Wine - a major auction house's listing of the 89 most consistently sought-after wines. Under the "Exceptional" heading, those available in Ireland include Penfold's Grange, Henschke Hill of Grace, Leeuwin Chardonnay, Penfold's Bin 707. p

  • Bottle Of The Week

    Greg Norman's shark symbol is on the strikingly handsome bottle, so you'd be forgiven for suspecting Greg Norman Estates Coonawarra Cabernet-Merlot 1998 (outlets above, £14.59£14.99) is the overpriced by-product of a big Mildara Blass marketing deal. No Not so. As a key investor in a premium vineyard, the wine-loving golfer isn't putting his name to anything shoddy, it seems. This is a super wine from Australia's classiest Cabernet region - suave, complex and rewarding. Tasted alongside a £15 Pomerol, it left the claret languishing a long way behind. Treat yourself. p
DESTINATION: SYRIABack to Top

  • Gems among the ruins

    The Bissos Church in the "Dead City" of Ruweiha with its latter-day congregation of shaggy sheep illustrates the under-developed nature of tourism in Syria. The church - the second largest in northern Syria and an important landmark of Byzantine architecture - has been occupied by a family of semi-nomads who have taken up residence among the ruins. p
ANOTHER LIFEBack to Top

  • Snatching at cupfuls of autumn

    How far it is across the bay depends on light and weather. On a fresh-washed, westerly morning, a dolphin might do it in 15 minutes, taking a bearing on the Tully supermarket or the glinting dormers of Renvyle House Hotel. In an easterly gloom, with Tully Mountain all the one grey in my window, it looks every mile of the hour it takes to drive up one side of Killary fiord and down the other. p

  • Eye On Nature

    A bird slightly bigger than a pigeon landed in the yard, walked up to within three feet of me and pecked at some food for a couple of minutes before flying away. It was white with small black spots, a black patch on its breast and white fur on its legs which covered half its claws. p
GARDEN ENTHUSIASTBack to Top

  • Growing your own naked nannies

    If I had to fill in an end-of-term report card for my garden, I'm afraid that for the subject Autumn-Flowering Plants I'd have to write: "Could do better". Looking around the late-September scene, I find rather too much of the tall Japanese anemone, `Honorine Jobert'. It is a beautiful plant: the white flowers are crowned by a golden boss of stamens, and are held proudly above the foliage. It never needs staking, is virtually immune to pest or disease, and increases enthusiastically. p

  • Diary Dates

    Tomorrow, 2 p.m.-6 p.m., Naul and District Gardening Club Millennium Show at the Naul GAA grounds. Highlights include superb displays of competitively-grown dahlias and chrysanthemums. Admission: £1. p

  • Garden Work

    Most herbaceous perennials may be divided now, although not asters, ornamental grasses, red hot pokers, or anything that is slightly tender. Shear off the old, tired foliage and flower stalks and dig up the plant. Prise apart the roots and throw out any woody or unproductive parts. Replant in soil that has been refreshed with garden compost or a proprietary soil conditioner. Add a dash of fertiliser (chicken manure pellets; blood, fish and bone; or granular plant food) to the planting hole. p
THE LAST STRAWBack to Top

  • Instilling a fear of flying

    My first-ever speeding fine arrived in the post recently, and I can have no complaints about it. The letter said I'd been spotted doing 43 miles an hour in a 30 zone; so, after a brief period of denial, my reaction was to hold my hands up and say: "It's a fair cop." p
ON THE TOWNBack to Top

  • It's an art attack

    There are creative outpourings all week, from installations to retrospectives to kinetic sculptures. The flood of creative energy is tidal. Artists lay claim to the capital in unprecedented numbers. From cathedrals to public squares to train stations, there they are. p

  • Cryptic talk

    At another event, in the half-light, it's whispered that the crypt of Christ Church Cathedral is packed with celebrities. Toni Colette, the star of Muriel's Wedding, is on a visit to Ireland. Film-maker John Boorman, his wife, Isabella Boorman, and their one-year-old daughter, Lili Boorman, are here. The actor, Adrian Dunbar, has come along. Actor John Hurt, with a nice bushy moustache, is here too. It's time to pray. p

  • Art in cyberspace

    An art event which sees up to 5,000 images and 950 artists launched onto the Internet takes place in Arthouse, in Temple Bar. All the contributing artists to the website are invited to witness the global launch of www.artifact.ie - "the most up-to-date website of Irish artistic practice in the world". Will they turn up? p

  • It's in the bag

    It was a case of have knapsack, will travel. The playwright Conor McPherson lumbers up the red carpet to the Savoy Cinema for the gala screening of Saltwater with a haversack on his back. Maybe he wants to make a quick getaway. It's the night of his directorial debut. Some speculate that his pack might contain golfing gear, a sport which he has taken up lately. p

  • Riddle of Ark

    Here's a riddle: five cakes are ordered for a birthday party. Five cakes are eaten. But when the guests arrive for the reception, there's no cake left! Just what happened is what we'd like to know. p

  • Southern cosmopolitanism

    All talk was of films, films, films at the lead-up party to this year's 45th Murphy's Cork Film Festival. In Loving Memory, a short film by Audrey O'Reilly, is to be screened. Her interest in film is due to her father, Tom O'Reilly, who, as a former Murphy's Brewery employee who retired after 40 years, brought them to every festival. p
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