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  • A funny old opera

    'It's like having sweets in your mouth,' Gavin Quinn, artisitic director of Pan Pan Theatre on Mozart's opera 'Cosi Fan Tutte', a version of which he is directing for the comapny. Photograph: Eric Luke That it involves footballers and WAGs are the only specifics director Gavin Quinn is willing to reveal about his updated version of Mozart's much-argued-over Così Fan Tutte , writes Arminta Wallace p

  • Intimacy in the suburb of good and evil

    Culture Shock: Now that it is coming to an end, it is easy to get sentimental about The Sopranos . But it is still the best TV programme ever made, writes Fintan O'Toole. p
Arts

  • All set for a city summer

    On the town: It's a new era, in which Dubliners are becoming like Parisians, says Tom Coffey, chief executive of the Dublin City Business Association, who teamed up with Dublin City Council this week to launch the Summer in Dublin 2007 programme. He listed cleaner air, less traffic, more shops and plenty to do as some of the city's biggest attractions. p

  • Blessed are Galway's peacemakers

     ArtScape: Forget about that big day out next Thursday. As far as Galway's arts community is concerned, the future starts on Monday, when the first attempt is made to initiate "peace negotiations" between various groupings, writes Lorna Siggins. p
About UsBack to Top

  • Captured in place and time

    The Annie Brophy exhibition of photographs offers a captivating chronicle of old Waterford City, writes Catherine Foley p

  • Hollywood film ended lean time

    Kerry locals made hay literally and figuratively during the shooting of Hollywood epic Ryan's Daughter . But despite the scenery, all was not well on location, writes Kevin Sweeney p

  • Horizons

    National Dawn Chorus Wildlife enthusiasts across Ireland will be setting their alarm clocks early tomorrow morning to join in Birdwatch Ireland's National Dawn Chorus events in various parks and woodlands. p
Book ReviewsBack to Top

  • Voices from the labyrinth of Georgian London

    Fiction To achieve literary fame through the phenomenal success of one book can be both a blessing and a curse. Tracy Chevalier's 1999 work Girl with a Pearl Earring made her a household name, but also set an exacting standard against which all subsequent novels would be judged. After the quieter successes of Falling Angels and The Lady and the Unicorn, Chevalier returns to form with this historical novel set in London in 1792-1793. p

  • The legacy of Labour

    History In 1941 "Big" Jim Larkin, at a protest meeting about the government's controversial Trade Union Bill, dramatically struck a match on the seat of his pants and set the offending document alight. p

  • At the cutting edge of early surgery

    Biography This is an excellent book of superlative horror, about surgery before anaesthetics, when doctors depended on grave-robbers to supply cadavers for experimental dissection. p

  • A transformation of observation

    Poetry In one of the brief lyrics that distinguish this, his sixth collection, Gerard Smyth - remembering how it was to work in a bakery - talks of "work that became a ritual". p

  • Wincing over the water cooler

    Fiction Joshua Ferris's glittering debut novel is a brilliant, tragicomic view of office life with a sharply satirical sideswipe at the corporate world and the advertising industry. p

  • Sinister campus days

    Fiction In his recent novel, Human Traces , Sebastian Faulks presented a story of two 19th-century psychiatrists seeking to interpret the human element of madness, an idea that serves as an apt precursor to this, his eighth novel, where he delves even deeper into a study of the mind in an ambitious story that fools the reader time and again with its clever plotting, unexpected twists and captivating narrative voice. p

  • In search of a lost family

    Non-Fiction Daniel Mendelsohn, son of liberal New York Jews, spent his childhood listening to his maternal grandfather, Abraham Jäger, telling extraordinary stories about Bolechow, the town of Ukrainians, Poles and Jews in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire where the family, before emigrating to the US, had lived for centuries. p

  • The war in the valleys

    Fiction It is well travelled territory; the story of the hapless maiden soon to become a maid no more. Admittedly Esther Evans, one of the several unusually passive central characters in Peter Ho Davies's gentle and extensively researched first novel, with its ambiance of an earlier time, is a capable 17-year-old, native Welsh-speaking girl who also speaks English, works in the local pub and keeps house for her widower father. p

  • A murder mystery wrapped in a Russian riddle

    Current Affairs Martin Sixsmith is a former BBC Moscow correspondent who, since leaving Russia in 2002, has written a number of books with Russian themes, including Moscow Coup: The Death of the Soviet System , and a humorous novel, I Heard Lenin Laugh . There is nothing funny about the Litvinenko case however, and the author has produced a sober work of non-fiction that is also a gripping whodunnit. p

  • The foul and fair of 'Finnegans Wake' A far-reaching study of Joyce's early drafts and notes

    Joyce Studies As well as being an important contribution to James Joyce studies, How Joyce Wrote 'Finnegans Wake' is also, more broadly, an important contribution to genetic textual scholarship, the study of the process of a writer's production. p

  • Paperbacks

    A selection of paperbacks reviewed p

  • Roll on November for Ford's finest

    LooseLeaves Caroline Walsh Summer isn't here yet and already news of books to come makes one yearn for autumn. p
Seen & HeardBack to Top

  • The burdens of democracy

    TV Review: Some prominent historians - the ones I've just made up - identify Ireland's three successive Eurovision Song Contest victories in the early 1990s as the key indicator that the nation was ready to shake off its animal skins, cast away its stone tools and begin forming itself into a new imperial power, writes Donald Clarke . p

  • The mourning after the night before

    Radio Review: Dark mutterings of voting pacts, electoral bias and being gutted by the result - flippin' heck, but don't we take Eurovision seriously?, Bernice Harrison asks. p

  • Another chapter of the e-book

    Present Tense:   Every afternoon, The Irish Times's literary desk piles high with new books, with some 30 or 40 arriving every day - maybe double that in the run-up to Christmas, says Shane Hegarty . p
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