Frank McNally

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Frank McNally

Fans of the 1970s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin may recall that it gave a new name to a certain desperate stratagem used by people who need to reinvent themselves. Despairing of his bland, suburban life, the hero stages an apparent drowning by leaving his clothes on a beach and disappearing. Thereafter, anyone faking suicide in this manner was said to have “done a Reggie Perrin”. But the tactic didn’t start with Reggie, of course.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Frank McNally

Among the visitors in Dublin for Bloomsday is the Indian writer, blogger, and photojournalist Mayank Austen Soofi. The “Austen” comes from Jane, one of his early literary loves. The rest of him comes from Uttarakhand, a state in Northern India, bordering Tibet. Since 2004, however, he has lived in Delhi and made that extraordinary city his life’s work. His blog is a Delhi-catessen of the city’s tastes, sights, sounds, and smells. It has been called “a one-man encyclopedia” of India’s capital.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Frank McNally

Further to the “U.P.: up” mystery in Joyce’s Ulysses (Diary, June 5th), there is the related puzzle of where we first meet Denis Breen: unfortunate recipient of the cryptic message who, if he wasn’t demented already, has been driven so by receipt of the anonymous postcard. He is now tramping around Dublin with two lawbooks under his oxter and on the way to see John Henry Menton about a £10,000 libel suit.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Frank McNally

James “Skin the Goat” Fitzharris (1833 – 1910), about whom we were talking here last week, was synonymous with an animal he supposedly turned into a rug after he caught it eating straw from his horse’s collar. Less well known is how the death of another four-legged creature, back in the 1830s, may have helped send the infamous cab driver to the scene of the Phoenix Park Murders half a century later.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Frank McNally

When Gerry Adams took his successful libel action against the BBC in a Dublin court recently, reader Ronan Dodd reminds me, he was following a path that had been trod as far back as the 1950s, in a landmark case involving James Joyce. Joyce was dead by then, but his writings lived on. And when BBC radio’s Third Programme marked the 50th anniversary of Bloomsday with a dramatisation of Paddy Dignam’s funeral, it was sued by one Reuben J Dodd Jnr, from whom Ronan is laterally descended.