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1 week ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
From sponsors with links to Putin to jerseys featuring a cartel boss, Joey D’Urso takes us on an eye-opening tour of modern soccerWhen I was a youngster in the 1980s, all of us passionately following English soccer clubs and the Ireland team, nobody wore replica jerseys – or hardly anyone. One kid came to hurling training in full Spurs kit one evening, around 1984 or ’85; he might have been clad in diamond-studded spandex, such was our wide-eyed amazement.
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1 week ago | 
spiked-online.com | Darragh McManus
If Ulysses came out today, it would be cancelled by Ireland’s Israelophobic elites.
Share Topics Books Culture UK Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter. Today is Bloomsday. It’s meant to be a day to celebrate the life and work of Irish novelist James Joyce.
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1 week ago | 
buff.ly | Darragh McManus |Tom Slater
If Ulysses came out today, it would be cancelled by Ireland’s Israelophobic elites.
Share Topics Books Culture UK Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter. Today is Bloomsday. It’s meant to be a day to celebrate the life and work of Irish novelist James Joyce.
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3 weeks ago | 
irishexaminer.com | Darragh McManus
‚ÄúThink global, act local‚ÄĚ: the phrase was coined in the 1970s, gained new currency in the '90s and remains relevant today. Think global ‚ÄĒ in other words, big picture, broad view, the important things ‚ÄĒ and act on an individual and community level. Its original authors meant it environmentally, but it can apply to all sorts of things. Irish arts and culture, for instance.
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4 weeks ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
Darragh McManus: Our children’s choice of replica shirts sums up the generation gap to a teeJames Smith of Cavan signs a jersey for a young supporter at Kingspan Breffni Park in Cavan. Photo by Ray McManus/SportsfileWe’re aware of them throughout the year, of course, but it’s really around this time that we start to notice them most. They’re more populous, more visible – unavoidable, essentially.
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1 month ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
‘I visited every country in the world without flying. When it was over, it felt like being released from prison’Thor Pedersen thought his epic global adventure would take a few years. It took a decade. He tells Darragh McManus why he’d be tempted to talk himself out of it if he had a time machine‘I wasn’t doing it just for me’: Thor Pedersen on a train in Sri Lanka in 2023. Photo: Mike DouglasWhen your name is Thor, you’re almost duty-bound to do something epically heroic at least once in your life.
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1 month ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
Non-fictionDo we currently live, to repurpose the words of the great philosopher Leibniz, in “the best of all possible worlds”? Yes, according to Peak Human, an exemplary book which studies world history through the prism of “what we can learn from the rise and fall of golden ages”.
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1 month ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
The writer reveals in The Last Ditch how he got back on track after he found himself incapable of travelling to watch
the sport he lovesSome years ago I was talking to a cousin who declared that he loved sportswriter Eamonn Sweeney’s work and invariably agreed with most of it; the Sligo native’s ‘Hold the Back Page’ column was always the first part of the Sunday Independent he turned to.
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2 months ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
Susie Dent creates an enjoyable countdown to detective riddles in her first novel Guilt by Definition FictionLexicographer and etymologist Susie Dent has branched out into fictionCelebrities writing crime novels is a big thing these days. Richard Osman, Graham Norton and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, among several others. The famous have expanded their reach beyond memoir to murder mysteries. Susie Dent, in fairness, while she is famous, is in no way a literary dillettante or Johnny-come-lately.
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2 months ago | 
independent.ie | Darragh McManus
Burn After Reading is another lively and often funny thriller from Catherine Ryan Howard, following an Irish writer sent to Florida to ghostwrite the memoir of a now infamous cyclist wanting to set the record straightCatherine Ryan Howard is, to quote the giddily enthusiastic blurbs on Burn After Reading, “queen of the unguessable twist”. That she is (or one of them at least), as well as being, definitively, a master craftsman of the thriller genre.
