An Interview with Philip Schultz, Poet

 
First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009
‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”
Schultz, now 64, [...]

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John Banville: The Art of Fiction, No. 200

 
 
My interview with John Banville, conducted on four occasions in Dublin between 2007 and 2008, has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here.

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Obama and the Arts: Hoping for a New Dawn

First Published: The Irish Times, January 22, 2009
AS PRESIDENTIAL portraits go, it’s a change – no surprise there. But the portrait of the US’s brand-new president, unveiled last weekend at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, represents a departure from form radical enough to raise the eyebrow of even the most slogan-weary watcher of [...]

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Arthur Miller’s Family Secret

First Published: The Irish Times, August 18, 2007
THE EULOGIES were eloquent, emotional, intense. They told of a life and of an art remarkable for its integrity, for its commitment to empathy and to truth; they showed a man and a writer battling against social and political injustice, against dishonesty, against discrimination. Arthur Miller was “the [...]

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Samantha Power,

On the afternoon of August 19th, 2003, in her Boston home, Samantha Power was hard at work on what she hoped would be her second book. Woman for Dark Times was the working title; it was set to be a political biography of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
The plan was to forage in Arendt’s life and [...]

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Out for your Blood: The Lieutenant of Inishmore

First Published: The Irish Times, May 27, 2006
REGARDLESS of their final verdict on the Broadway production of Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, there’s one bodily fluid that has been given liberal mention in the reviews. “Blood winds up on pretty much every surface,” wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times; “bloodbath”, “blood-soaked” and [...]

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