Yearly Archives: 2021
The 12 Blogs of Christmas #3: On Making a Start in Publishing
There are plenty of people looking to get into book publishing; inevitably, they want to know a bit more about it before they begin. On...
The 12 Blogs of Christmas: #2 On Language and Illness
Those who signed up to fight in the first world war were told it would be over by Christmas. Years later, they were still slogging it o...
The 12 Blogs of Christmas #1: Festive Food & Drink
Nigel Slater* gave us his “twelve tastes of Christmas” recently, so we thought we’d pitch in with a few festive posts of our own. We’ll...
No prophet is accepted in their own land
The brand-leader – promoted at great expense – has a habit of sucking the oxygen out of the room for everyone else. This is no less the...
From genre bending to gender bending
Delighted to see the new review from Anne Cunningham, syndicated across a number of Irish newspapers, of Owen Dwyer's new novel The Gar...
The Friday Read: How Women Were Airbrushed Out of History
We all want to be kind. It is fundamental to our well-being. Yet we live in a world of profound inequality, where only 1 percent of tit...
England 2 Germany 0
Around a century ago, Ireland was plunged into a bloody civil war. The conflict pitted neighbour against neighbour, divided families, a...
A video review for Bloomsday
Happy Bloomsday all. I was going to post about our new fiction imprint, Ely's Arch, coming your way on 14 July, but that can wait. We o...
Last night’s TV
I don't know if "enjoyed" is the right word, but last night's RTÉ One programme on #partition, as part of the #DecadeofCente...
To Kindness and All Who Sail in Her
Great launch last night for #ThePursuitofKindness by Éamonn Toland. Many thanks to legendary (and sprightly!) editor Alan Ri...
New Perspectives at the National Gallery
At the weekend, I was lucky enough to get to the National Gallery to see the exhibition New Perspectives: the artworks the gallery has ...
It’s Still Not Too Late To Pursue Kindness
Many moons ago, I was a student in a tutorial on Late Anglo-Saxon England – a growth area in historical research at the time. (Hard to ...
The Pursuit of Kindness
“Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes. Now that he can realise them, he must either ...
Last night’s TV
Last night, Channel 4’s 24 Hours in Police Custody centred on a case of coercive control which ended, tragically, with the death of the...
What’s another year
Here at Liberties Press, we were sorry to hear about the death of Shay Healy. Among his many contributions to the gaiety of this and ot...
Sign language
Philip Roth once said that people tended to glamourise the process of writing a book. He compared it to building a wall: you put one br...
What’s in a name?
All professions use jargon: terms which are familiar to insiders – and not to those outside the fold. It’s partly a kind of secret code...
Tina Forever
Last night we watched the documentary film Tina, about the remarkable life of rock ’n’ roll legend Tina Turner. When we talk about “leg...
Brevity Is the Soul: Out with the Old
Let’s call a spade a spade: 2020 will not go down in the annals as a vintage year. The birds continued to sing (more often than before,...
From the West down to the East
"So, Mr Larkin, you're a distinguished poet. What are you doing out here in Hull, so far from the centre?"
Philip Larkin, possibly afte...