Word: dublin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road . . ." Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Viking; 282 pages; $20.95) opens this way: "We were coming down our road." The echo sounds intentional, as if Doyle, with fine Irish fatalism, knows that all books about Dublin's seedy, seething street life carry the curse of invidious comparison with the works of the master. Why not invoke it at the top and then get on with the story...
...inevitably, will wonder what the Booker judges could possibly have been thinking. For Paddy Clarke, while intermittently funny, fresh and affecting, is ultimately frustrating. Its hero serves as its narrator, a 10- year-old boy trying, with his gang of schoolmates and other pals, to wreak mischief in their Dublin neighborhood, circa the mid-1960s. Graffiti, whether spray-painted or gouged in wet cement, constitute a major offensive strategy. Another is invading forbidden turf, such as walled-off backyards, where the prospect of a pair of ladies' knickers on a clothesline drives the lads into a frenzy of guilty glee...
...harrowing American play produced outside New York City this year. It debuted briefly at Actors Theatre of Louisville's annual new play festival in March, and the same production opened a five-week run last week at Connecticut's Hartford Stage Company. Other stagings have been seen at the Dublin Festival and, currently, in Washington, and one is planned at Houston's Alley Theatre...
...shown consistent majorities in favor of union with Britain remain too high, especially for Prime Minister John Major, who now needs the votes of the nine Protestant Unionists in the House of Commons as a cushion to defend his thin majority. And if London cannot afford to lose Ulster, Dublin cannot afford, for economic reasons, to welcome it back into a united Ireland...
...cover for their inaction, leaders in London and Dublin blame the impasse on bloody-minded political attitudes in the North. But they also have a point. Politicians in Ulster constantly plead for peace but have shown themselves incapable of making the kind of bold moves that broke the logjam in South Africa and the Middle East. In the North "there are no autonomous political leaders strong enough to carry their followers along the road to compromise," explains Brendan O'Leary, a political scientist at the London School of Economics. "The politicians are very representative of the hard lines in their...