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From The Blog

Among the Flutterers

The Editors, 11 February 2013

... Colm Tóibín in the LRB (19 August 2010) on Ratzinger's election and pontificate: This idea that the Church should represent not merely the private religious beliefs of its members, but a view of how policy on public matters should be evaluated and carried out all over the world, belongs as much to the legacy of Wojtyla as any strengthening of the Church as a locus of an advanced spirituality ...

Poped

Hugo Young, 24 November 1994

The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe 
by Colm Tóibín.
Cape, 296 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 03767 6
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... In Kiev in 1992, Colm Tóibín met the Bishop of Zhytomir, who was dressed in his full regalia. ‘He had that wonderful, well-fed, lived-in look that reminded me of several Irish bishops.’ The Bishop surely personified the universal assurance of the episcopacy and, although he had been back in Kiev for only a year, of Catholicism itself ...
From The Blog

Booker Biz

Thomas Jones, 8 September 2009

... didn't make the shortlist, though one of them surely should have: Liam McIlvanney on Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín Michael Newton on Me Cheeta by James Lever Pieces in the paper by Mantel and ...

Mothering

Terry Eagleton: The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín, 14 October 1999

The Blackwater Lightship 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 273 pp., £15, September 1999, 0 330 38985 8
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... You know, in my family,’ remarks a gay Irish architect in Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship, ‘my brothers and sisters – even the married ones – still haven’t told my parents that they are heterosexual.’ It is a neat Wildean inversion, one of the few good jokes in this harrowing, deeply unfunny novel, and a flash of wit with wider implications ...
From The Blog
... so he later claimed). Further back in the LRB archive you can read Rachel Nolan on Harsh Times, Colm Tóibín on The Dream of the Celt, Michael Wood on The Feast of the Goat, Lorna Scott Fox on The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Philip Horne on The Perpetual Orgy, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service , The War of the End of the World and Aunt Julia ...
From The Blog

LRB Castaways

, 3 June 2022

... Mary Midgley (2005), Tariq Ali (2008), Mary Beard (2010), Ahdaf Soueif (2012), Colm Tóibín (2016) and Anne Enright ...

Motiveless Malignity

D.A.N. Jones, 11 October 1990

The Dwarfs 
by Harold Pinter.
Faber, 183 pp., £11.99, October 1990, 0 571 14446 2
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The Comfort of Strangers, and Other Screenplays 
by Harold Pinter.
Faber, 226 pp., £14.99, September 1990, 0 571 14419 5
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The Circus Animals 
by James Plunkett.
Hutchinson, 305 pp., £12.99, September 1990, 0 09 173530 0
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The South 
by Colm Tóibín.
Serpent’s Tail, 238 pp., £7.99, May 1990, 1 85242 170 3
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... concerned with sojourning abroad, the dangers and the alienation. We are in the Fifties again (Colm Toibin was born in 1955), concerned not with Communist Russia but with Fascist Spain. The artistic Katherine has abandoned her husband and ten-year-old son in Ireland and escaped to Barcelona. Her widowed mother, who now lives in London, had made a ...

Thick Description

Nicholas Spice, 24 June 1993

The Heather Blazing 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 245 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 330 32124 2
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... a fairer comparison for the sentences from the Granta and Faber anthologies might be the work of Colm Tóibín, a contemporary of the authors represented there, and like them, a practitioner of the art of bald prose. The relation of text to representation in The Heather Blazing, Tóibín’s second novel, is established in its first sentence, which stands as ...

On the Bus

Andrew O’Hagan, 29 July 2021

... road behind him. O’Shea’s photographs happen ‘when people are about to do something else’, Colm Tóibín writes in the afterword. ‘He composes his image before the image has composed itself.’ That seems to me a different way of thinking about Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. O’Shea catches the uncertain moment, when the thing that might ...

Havering and Wavering

Blake Morrison: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Long Island’, 6 June 2024

Long Island 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 287 pp., £20, May, 978 1 0350 2944 0
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... Atonement, The Remains of the Day and The English Patient do no great disservice to the books. And Colm Tóibín wasn’t unhappy with Nick Hornby’s screenplay for Brooklyn, despite two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss Kelly intimates to Eilis that she knows about her secret marriage in the US, Eilis ...

The Coldest Place on Earth

Liam McIlvanney: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Brooklyn’, 25 June 2009

Brooklyn 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 252 pp., £17.99, April 2009, 978 0 670 91812 6
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... in Brooklyn. Father Flood will sponsor her passage and find her a job. If Father Rossiter in Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, ‘hated to see people emigrating’, Father Flood is all for it. He wants to see Eilis working in an office, not wasting her youth in a corner shop. A girl like Eilis, he is sure, will get ahead in New ...

Closet Virtuoso

Seamus Perry: Magic Mann, 24 February 2022

The Magician 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 438 pp., £18.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 00461 6
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... the real one’ was not well calculated to placate him.So Mann is an excellent subject for Colm Tóibín, who, both in criticism and fiction, has always been interested in the processes by which, as Auden once put it, the writer ‘fetches/The images out that hurt and connect/From Life to Art’. This novel, a thoughtful and deeply acquainted ...

The Sacred Cause of Idiom

Frank Kermode: Lady Gregory, 22 January 2004

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 127 pp., £7.99, September 2003, 0 330 41993 5
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... remark – jocular, perhaps, and not the sort of sally she would have chosen to be remembered by. Colm Tóibín makes more than one allusion to it in this essay, gently hinting that his sympathies are with the toothbrushless, though there is no place for anger in his elegant little study of the great lady. Her close association with W.B. Yeats, with ...

The lighthouse stares back

Matthew Bevis: Tóibín on Bishop, 7 January 2016

On Elizabeth Bishop 
by Colm Tóibín.
Princeton, 209 pp., £13.95, March 2015, 978 0 691 15411 4
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... people hand you back, like an obligation, flat statements of what you “meant”?’ Colm Tóibín avoids this temptation. On Elizabeth Bishop is an engaging introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her work in his life. May Swenson told Bishop that, when reading some of her poems, ‘I have to furnish them with ...
From The Blog

Clerical Abuse

Bernard Porter, 17 March 2016

... Our Paedophile Culture · 8 November 2012 Anne Enright: Antigone in Galway · 17 December 2015 Colm Tóibín: The Dangers of a Priestly Education · 1 December ...

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