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On Superposition
Meet Joe. He’s an ordinary guy. See him moving around his small apartment in the early morning, upright but not fully on, making a pot ...
On Seminality
Certain things are said to be “seminal”. The early scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where a bone is thrown into the air and becomes ...
On Bosons. And Name-dropping
“Now, did I read that somewhere, my dear fellow, or did I think it?”*
There are two basic types of fundamental particles: fermions a...
On Duality
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I decided to study physics. I did so because it offered a concrete and dependable model of the world...
On Indeterminacy
You will often hear it stated, in certain circles, that nothing can be said about the outcome of some quantum interaction or other, whe...
As kind as sunshine: Why I write
Years ago, I had a conversation with my mother about the Middle East. With mingled pleasure
and pain, she told me about her c...
The Strange Case of the Missing Zero and the Over-mighty Neighbour
It sounds like the title of a Sherlock Holmes story. In fact, we're talking about something more prosaic: the relative strengths of pub...
On Love and Loss
Last summer, my mother succumbed to cancer after a fleeting battle. Beautiful and generous, she was beloved by all who knew her. After ...
Work in Progress: the Craft of Printing
It takes a village to raise a child; a book is the work of many hands.
In today's digital world, most of us pay far too little attenti...
Refuge by Fatema Alarabi
In the streets where you grew up, there you will live and there you will die.
The Greek poet Cavafy, often quoted by the late great Ir...
Bare
With beach-read season in full flow, we were heartened to read Kirsty Blake-Knox's cover story in the Irish Independent magazine, inves...
Sorry for Your Trouble
Richard Ford is arguably our finest living short-story writer. His latest collection, Sorry for Your Trouble, released in 2022, contain...
Ashes Cricket on Bloomsday
The planets aligning – or a cosmic joke?
So, the eagerly anticipated first Ashes Test starts today – Bloomsday. For the uninitiated, th...
The staying power of the book
My first job on leaving university, in the early nineties, was as an archivist with a merchant bank in the City of London. I had two bo...
Ireland is a small country
Six degrees of separation are often shrunk to two or three. A chance remark can rapidly become national news. Those who took part in th...
THE RIVER HEALER by Paddy Reid
The first of two great new books coming from Liberties Press this autumn is THE RIVER HEALER by Paddy Reid.
Paddy is a fine writer, cur...
Last night’s TV: Ardal O’Hanlon, Tomb Raider
Last night, on BBC 1, Ardal O'Hanlon took a pleasant trawl through Irish archaeology – a subject which has received less attention than...
The First Heresy, Ulysses and the importance of KBO
This year marks the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. This work is widely acknowledged to be one of the great work...
Last night’s TV: Viking Apocalypse
With Storms Dudley and Eunice menacing these islands – have a pair of storms ever had less threatening names – now might be a good time...
Belfast and beyond
Best of luck to all those nominated for this year's Academy Awards. Particular kudos to Kenneth Branagh, director of Belfast, who has a...
Last night’s TV: Coercive Control
Last night, RTÉ 1 broadcast Domestic Abuse: A Year in Crisis, a film made by Barry O'Kelly of the RTÉ Investigates unit. The programme ...
The Treaty, A Hundred Years On
#OnThisDay one hundred years ago, the Treaty creating Ireland as an independent public was ratified by the Dáil, the Irish Parliament. ...
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...
Sometimes, it takes a lifetime to become an overnight success
I recently took part in a (virtual) session at the Science Foundation Ireland Summit on writing, and publishing, books on scientific su...