Archie Cornish

Jun 12, 2024 | review31.co.uk | Archie Cornish

Around the turn of the Millennium the English — some of them — started thinking anew about their national identity, and how to disentangle it from Britishness. A catalyst, looking back, is often supposed to be the England men’s football team’s charge to the semi-finals of Euro 1996. The years since have seen a stream of enquiries into Englishness across a range of fields, from sociology to the history of pop music.

Dec 19, 2023 | review31.co.uk | Archie Cornish

Michael Magee, Close to Home Hamish Hamilton, 288pp, ISBN 9780241582978, £14.99Rachel Connolly, Lazy City Canongate 288pp, ISBN 9781838859664, £16.99Sean, protagonist of Michael Magee’s Close to Home, is looking for his father. His mother brought him up in west Belfast after his dad left to start a new family in the countryside. Having tracked him down, Sean runs some searches (‘I looked it up on maps’).

Dec 4, 2023 | the-fence.com | Archie Cornish | |Stephen Smith |John Phipps

Looking for the real thing in Dublin. There’s a building on Earlsfort Terrace, central Dublin, that you would walk past hundreds of times without ever noticing. It’s a rectangular structure built from warm-hued red-and-yellow bricks, 40 metres long with a steep, gabled roof. In place of windows there are blank recessed panels, as if to emphasise the inscrutability of what goes on inside.

Sep 7, 2023 | the-fence.com | Archie Cornish |Francisco Garcia |Francisco García |Sally Howard |Jimmy McIntosh

A meeting with a remarkable woman hoping to revive an almost unknown British sport. The final of the world championships this spring saw a flurry of first-half goals. Finland had pegged back Sweden to 1-1 after they took the lead, but two scores in as many minutes from Joel Broberg and Christoffer Edlund earned the Swedes a comfortable buffer heading into the break. There was no way back for Finland, and when the 90 minutes were up Sweden celebrated their 13th title.

Aug 16, 2023 | review31.co.uk | Archie Cornish

In Anna Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001), the protagonist Amelia watches as her big sister and a gang of friends deliberately poison themselves. The grown-ups have left the building but there’s not much to do in 1980s Ardoyne. So Lizzie and ‘the Girls’ divide out a ‘twelve-year old nutmeg’ and wash it down with ‘an ancient packet of mustard and a rusty tin of peas’. Amelia watches them laugh in delight as the bad peas explode, ‘one by one inside them’.