a whole new world

The Banned Book list in Ireland has disappeared to a large extent – haven’t seen one in libraries in years – though it does still exist.

However, in the United States, individuals can challenge the inclusion of books in public and school libraries. As I was writing about Ray Bradbury back in November, the irony of ‘Fareinheit 451’ being banned at one point and the book itself being about censorship was glaringly obvious. The list of the most challenged and banned books reads more like a list of the 20th century’s best works, including not only ‘Fareinheit 451’, but ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, ‘Ulysses’, ‘The Colour Purple’ and many more. Read more »

View Port of Dublin Image Gallery

The River Liffey, and the port that lies at its mouth, is the commercial lifeblood of Dublin city. This image gallery celebrates the Port of Dublin and those who worked in it throughout the twentieth century. From dockers and shipwrights to barge-men and captains of industry, 'all along the riverrun' they made their livelihoods.

Viking ships sailed up the port to discharge their cargoes and steal away the plunder of the land. In the sixteenth century, vessels unloaded their goods at Merchant's Quay and Wood Quay. Dublin was given a great commercial totem in 1791 with the construction of a new Custom House building and the development of the docks. In 1867 the management of the port was put into the hands of the Dublin Port and Docks Board. Read more »

You might well wonder, where does Scotland meet Germany? Or to be more precise, where does Glasgow meet Hamburg? The answer lies in the person of Craig Russell, Scottish-born author and the creator of two wonderful crime series, one set in Hamburg, the other, needless to say, in Glasgow.

The series set in Hamburg stars Detective Jan Fabel, he being half-Scottish and half-German, and stems from Russell's interest in the culture and people of Germany. Russell, born in Fife in Scotland in 1956, is an ex-policeman and fluent German speaker, and his Fabel series have been a big success not alone in Germany but elsewhere, having been translated into 23 languages. Read more »

View Image Gallery

Cinema-going has always been extremely popular with Dubliners. It was the city's most famous son, James Joyce, who helped bring the exciting new art-form to Dublin when the Volta Picture Theatre opened on Mary Street in December 1909. Joyce was the Managing Director. Elsewhere the Father Mathew Hall on Church Street was attending to the city's growing appetite for 'Cinematograph and Bioscope Exhibitions'. Read more »

View Short Back & Sides Gallery.

This gallery celebrates Dublin's Barbers, Hairdressers, Hair Stylists and 'Artists in Male Hair'. Dubliners have always been a fashion conscious crew and we hope these images bring back happy (or maybe not so happy) memories of perms, continental styles, beehives, quiffs, and mullets. Read more »

While Nordic authors and settings seem to dominate my crime reads, the list is not exclusively Northern European I am glad to say. I have even endeavoured to go beyond wider Europe, taking in the US of A, the Middle East, south-east Asia, and even Africa. And it is to Africa that I travel in this post, with two authors to mention, South Africa's Deon Meyer (see below) and Southern Rhodesia's (aka Zimbabwe's) Alexander McCall Smith. McCall Smith a Rhodesian, you might ask? Well, while living in Scotland, he is correctly speaking a Rhodesian-born Scotsman who has also spent some considerable time in Botswana. A prodigious writer, he is probably best known as the author of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. The agency is located in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. So far the series extends to thirteen titles, of which I have to date read two. Read more »