Daughters of the Late Colonel
Katherine Mansfield’s brilliant short story ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is distinguished by a lightness of touch, as she lets us into the minds of two sisters whose hectoring father has just died.
Read MoreOn the Design of Poetry Textbooks
Poetry is the most dense and intense literary form. It needs time and space. But too often the design of contemporary textbooks does precisely the opposite.
Read MoreJ.L. Carr's 'A Month in the Country'
J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country (1980) is a perfectly-achieved novel. In its 85 pages it contains multitudes.
Read MoreA Manual For Cleaning Women
Lucia Berlin’s title story for her collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is funny, painful, sharp, observant: just marvellous.
Read MoreThe Usborne Complete Shakespeare
This collection of re-tellings of 37 plays is highly recommended for children, and will also be useful for adults.
Read More'Beowulf' by Maria Dahvana Headley
Maria Dahvana Headley’s sparkling new version of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf also features a brilliant introductory essay on the world as it is right now.
Read MoreIn The End, It Was All About Love
Musa Okwonga’s In The End, It Was All About Love is a small book with many pleasures.
Read MoreLeaving Certificate Paper 2
An analysis of the Higher and Ordinary literature papers in this year’s Leaving Certificate.
Read MoreLeaving Certificate Paper 1
First reaction to English Paper 1 in the 2021 Leaving Certificate.
Read More'To be or not to be' in BSL
Jamal Ajala performs ‘To be or not to be’ in BSL: an opportunity for an interesting exercise in class.
Read MoreThe Lost Café Schindler
Meriel Schindler’s The Lost Café Schindler: one family, two wars and the search for truth is an absorbing account of the ways the fortunes of a Jewish family in Austria ebbed and flowed through history.
Read MoreWilliam Trevor's Schooldays
My long essay on the Irish Times website today on William Trevor and the influence of his schooldays on his fiction is here. Today would have been his 93rd birthday.
Notes on Grief
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest (very short) book recounts how her father’s death in 2020 hit it brutally, in ways she was unprepared for.
Read MoreMacbeth 6: ten key quotations
The final post in a series of 6 for pupils revising Macbeth. Here are 10 key quotations: think about their significance and write notes before reading the analyses.
Read MoreA Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders has written a superb book presenting and then commenting on seven great stories by the Russian masters. It is marvellous.
Read MoreOne of Them
Musa Okwonga’s One of Them: an Eton College memoir is a highly pleasurable and beautifully written personal reflection.
Read MoreCat in the Rain
An exercise for English class suggested by George Saunders in his marvellous book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: divide Hemingway’s story ‘Cat in the Rain’ into 6 equal parts, handing them out one at a time, and examining the ‘escalations’ of the story.
Read MoreOur Lady of the Nile
Scholastique Mukasonga’s début novel, now re-released by Daunt Books, is a startling and surprising approach to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Read MoreMacbeth 5: the end
Essay 5 in a series on Macbeth looks at the end, particularly the key speech ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.’
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