Category Archives: Journalism
Ferulas & Thuribles
My review of John Mulholland’s book ‘Ferulas & Thuribles.’ A worthwhile Stonyhurst memoir Memory may fail us, not least as we enter our twilight years, but as luminaries such as Marcel Proust and T.S Eliot recognised, we carry within us our past, and parts of it can resurface unconsciously, and take shape if mind and body allow us that extra mile in which to reflect and discern. As Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, this use of memory is for liberation-‘not least of love but expanding of love beyond desire , …
Good Friday Agreement remembered
A Personal Memory by Jimmy Burns The author, who covered Northern Ireland during the 1990’s as a journalist with the FT , remembers the key final stages of the peace process that led to the historic deal. With the approach of the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday agreement, and what promises to be a make or break in terms of the latest attempt to settle stormy waters in the province with a planned visit by President Biden later this month (April), personal memories flood back of …
How should we remember war?
How should we remember war ? As a new virtual museum tells the story of the Spanish Civil War, Jimmy Burns looks at the place of memory in a seismic conflict (Published in The Tablet www.thetablet.co,uk 29/October/2022) Spain limped into the third decade of the 20th century fractured “with one half of her being, for the other half lingered with El Cid and the conquistadores” .As Jan Morris went on to also note in The Presence of Spain,(published in 1964) she was “a mess of a country”, tortured by …
A necessary friendship
In 1954 When I was a one year old , my Spanish mother took me to see a bit of Royal pageantry near Buckingham Palace on the occasion of Emperor Haile Selassie’s state visit to the UK. So my mother told me many years later, she arrived to find that the crowds had built up, led by a line of uniformed English nannies with their young charges occupying the first row giving on to the main square from the side of St James’s Park. Undeterred, my mother gently moved her …
Encounters with the Common Good
I know I am not alone in struggling not to be overwhelmed at times by all the negativity in so many words and acts, a sense of despair about the state of the world from Brexit to Trump, via massacres and other man-made disasters. So let me share three shared encounters in recent days that reminded me that our spirits can be lifted if we allow other less binary, less visceral and conflictive human narratives to give us direction and a sense of common purpose. The first was a silent …
Sweet Lemon Grove, Sicily
La Casa di Melo, where we stayed for two nights, was one of several highlights of our Sicilian holiday, along with our visits to Mount Etna, and The Godfather excursions to medieval mountain villages. It is a beautifully renovated family-owned farm house which year round welcomes guests as a bio-hotel, run with great charm by its current owners, a youthful married couple called Lorenzo and Chiara. The hotel retains a distinctive traditional air, with antique furniture from Chiara’s original family home, dispersed liberally along corridors and rooms, and a wine …
Warsaw Diary
There was a long queue at passport control at Warsaw’s Chopin airport on arrival from London. ‘Never happened before’ said a young polish lady. I and another British national looked at each other with the thought passing through our minds- is Brexit already with us? It turned out there were a couple of police officers who had turned up late for their shift and in the end we all swept through the EU lane relatively smoothly- but for a few minutes it did make one think, how …
‘Silence’: A film worth discernment
I am grateful to Father Nye, a wise old Jesuit friend for advising me to go and see and make my own mind up about Silence which arrived at my local London movie house on New Year’s Day. ‘Only don’t expect humour. It doesn’t have any’, ‘he added. Up to that point a reading of some reviews had led me to thinking I might avoid it. The suggestion was that this was an overlong and dark film, with a somewhat leaden dialogue, a miscast central character, and containing scenes of …
John le Carré & Graham Greene
Review of Adam Sisman’s Biography of John le Carré pubilshed in The Tablet 17 December 2015 As admirers of Graham Greene will know, espionage can provide the context for exceptional novels. Few living writers have learned that lesson as well as David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré. Le Carré, like Greene, drew from his own experience in the intelligence servies to produce some of his best work: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, relatively early on in his writing career, and …
