David Monaghan

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TV Review | The Crown’s Fourth Season Turns on its Duty Bound Queen

The Crown season four opens with a bang. Quite literally. For three seasons, creator and lead writer Peter Morgan had been reticent about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. While incidents like Aberfan disaster and the UK miners’ strike of 1972 were given the time they deserved, the escalating conflict across the Irish Sea never got a look in. The presence of Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance), however, made tackling the subject an inevitability.
Dublin Inquirer •

A Woman Remembers Her Rathgar Bookshop, Closed a Year Now

Liz Meldon had been nervous about coming back, she says. We are leaving the road in Rathgar where her bookshop used to be. She had spent more than a decade of her life working here, but she hadn’t come back for quite a while. “I couldn’t put a finger on exactly why,” she says. “It’s always the people you miss the most, about anything. I mean think about it.” She takes one last look in the window to wave goodbye to old friends, customers, and pulls away. Through the windshield is a wet winter morning.
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A Dublin Bloom | An Interview with Dermot Bolger

Dermot Bolger is a stalwart of the Irish literary scene, having written numerous novels and plays since the mid-1980s. He is known to indigenous readers as a champion of working-class narratives, but the subject matter of his fiction is far-reaching and touches off many facets of Irish life. It is unsurprising then that he would choose to concern himself with Joyce‘s Ulysses, a sprawling narrative that interrogates the contradictions of life in Dublin in the early 20th century.
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10 Years On | Is Funny Games A Soulless Exercise In Movie Violence?

The original Funny Games debuted in 1997, generating a critical storm of both condemnation and adoration. Directed by arthouse darling Michael Haneke, the film acts as a contemplative thesis on the nature of consumable violence, particularly that which is expressed through the American slasher film. Haneke remade the film, beat for beat, with an American cast in 2007 (and released on this day in 2008).
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