Ciaran Carson: The Dichotomy of Being
Belfast writer, and poet, Ciaran Carson carried a black flute with silver keys on its…
Browsing: Culture
Julian Lloyd: Pure Luck and Happenstance
Julian Lloyd’s iconic portrait of Nick Drake now forms part of the U.K.’s National Portrait…
John Betjeman’s Love Affair with Ireland
The colourful humourist and English poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) is the subject of…
Michel Houllebecq and the End of History
Inspired by Michel Houllebecq’s novel Atomised (1998), Ben Pantrey considers the endurance of the Christian…
Pietas in Richard Kearney’s Novel Salvage
When, after a long siege, the Greeks breach the defences of Troy, Aeneas must flee.…
SUVs: A Symbol of Our Demise
This article has been gestating for some time. I must admit to a long-standing loathing…
Tunnel Vision in Chișinău, Moldova
Gary Farrelly is an Irish visual and performance artist based in Brussels. Together with his…
Smartphone usage is impacting society, but how?
Whether we’re regularly reading sports news or contributing to a comical WhatsApp group, many of…
Theatre: The Battle of Kildare Place
There is no fiercer battle than that between sisters. The sibling tension is ever-present in…
Looking for Scraps
Rushing down the lane to the beach, I race in the direction of clarity; the…
Fiction Reader’s Block
We all see things with different eyes and it gets you nowhere hoping that one…
Common Concerns: John Clare & Other Ghosts
There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the…
Cassandra Voices Podcast: Loafing Hero
In our latest podcast Ben Pantrey interviews former musician of the month Bartholomew Ryan in…
On the Nature of Evil
I met Vladimir Putin once. Or, at least, I was in the same room as…
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob
In a quiet room, two men smoke hashish and discuss the inevitability of the Apocalypse.…
Review: Richard Kearney’s Touch
Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and…
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
I have a mild neurosis, situated in Utopian wish-fulfillment, of the ideal that I often…
Where is Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World?
For Christmas two years ago, my mother bought me a copy of Sally Rooney’s novel…
Love and Literature in Numbers
Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls.…
Ireland: The Lipsticked Pig
On February 15th, 2021, John Buckley McQuaid, released an album of original songs about Ireland,…