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An Irishman’s Diary

An Irishman’s Diary

Flann O’Brien takes centre stage, while the latest round of celebrity ‘interviews’ are in need of a tough producer

The band’s gorgeously melodramatic second album, Convertible, is a gripping listen

by William Palmer (Robinson £20, 262pp) The size of my monthly Majestic Wine bill suggests author William Palmer is not wrong when he says that writers — ‘psychologically slippery’ at the best of times — are particularly prone to the joys and pitfalls of grain and grape. Booze, ‘at least at the outset, is hugely enjoyable’, Palmer says correctly. It is ‘an excellent buffer against social boredom,’ and any other sort of boredom. Drawing on the descriptions by Anthony Burgess and...

Lankum will take part in a Tims Listening Party next week on Twitter :: VerseChorusVerse – Be Proud (single, self-released) FIRST up this week is the new single from VerseChorusVerse, aka singer/songwriter Tony Wright. Be Proud was actually released two weeks ago as a taster for his forthcoming new album – but I totally forgot to review it. Apologies, Tony. However, better late than never, especially as its a tune which finds the former And So I Watch You From Afar man channelling his inne...

WandaVision’s Weekly Mystery Box Is a Throwback to the Glory Days of Lost WandaVision Halfway through the series, there are a lot of things I love about WandaVision. First and foremost, it finally kicks off Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) — quite a shift from the original plan due to COVID-19. Getting to spend more time with Wanda Maximoff and Vision — two characters with rich comic book histories who weren’t fully fleshed out in films — has been a treat. And it’s al...

“The bicycle was still there,” writes Simone de Beauvoir towards the beginning of her second novel, The Blood of Others, “brand new, with its pale-blue frame and its plated handlebars … It was so lissom, so slender, that even when not in use it seemed to cut through the air.” There is something wildly seductive about this bicycle, something that compels Beauvoir’s heroine, Hélène, to go so far as to contemplate theft. Implicit in the description of this bicycle is a sense of free...

Remembering John O’Brien Much like the books he published, John O’Brien (1945–2020) was a complicated man. He was an idealist who devoted his life to a self-described “quixotic enterprise” of creating a repository for strange, innovative fiction from around the world—fiction that would stay in print forever, for future generations of readers to discover and wonder at. John had impeccable taste in literature. He especially liked French and Eastern European literature that toyed with ...