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Free will and Brexit
Julian Baggini
‘Whether or not you think 23 June was a great day for Britain and Europe, it was a very bad one for freedom.’
Black Country
Anthony Cartwright
‘There’s a sense, I think, that what that X in the box translates as is seventeen and a half million voices that say, we’re still here.’
Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men
Pwaangulongii Dauod
‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’
The Decay of Politics
Philip Ó Ceallaigh
‘Britain has made the control of borders and the free movement of people its central obsession, its fundamental national anxiety.’ Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Brexit.
Before They Began to Shrink
Nic Dunlop
‘The numbers killed at Aughrim that day will never be known.’
Cracking Up
Kevin Breathnach
‘It has been several weeks since I slept for more than an hour, and lately I’ve been feeling on the verge of cracking up.’
The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion
Kevin Barry
‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’
On Sonnet 50
Paula Bohince
‘I love Shakespeare’s slow insistence, which mirrors the action within the poem: there is nothing but grief to reach.’ Paula Bohince on Shakespeare’s sonnet 50.
Crossings
Tim Beckett
‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.