Padraig Rooney

Padraig Rooney’s most recent book is The Gilded Chalet: Travels in Literary Switzerland.

Letter

To Turn One’s Plate

10 August 2023

Tom Stevenson’s survey of diplomacy’s ‘smell of flintlock … and a certain glamour’ called to mind my stint at the end of the 1980s as English editor and language dogsbody at a Japanese embassy to a kingdom I shall leave nameless (LRB, 10 August). My editorial high point was to give the nod, on the death of Emperor Hirohito, to a notice for release to the newspapers, carefully worded by...

North/South: Monaghan-Armagh

Padraig Rooney, 7 February 2019

At the end​ of the 1960s, just as the Troubles were starting, I learned to drive in a blue Volkswagen on the minor roads criss-crossing the Irish border, my father on tenterhooks in the passenger seat. Undignified by markings, these roads remain unlabelled and unnumbered on Google Maps. If they had names, they were for townlands, grand Plantation houses or abandoned highways: Bessmount,...

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