Wind, Storm and Cloud
A flinchin is a deceitful promise of better weather. Skub is hazy clouds driven by the wind. And a ciabhar
is a slight breeze, just enough to stir the hair.
Reportage
Becoming Westerly
'It’s funny how the ocean calls out to you. It’s not about checking wave cams on the Internet, or reading the surf forecast. It’s a feeling in your bones and blood, something like the way dogs sense earthquakes.'
On Kate Bush
'There is something about Kate Bush’s voice – her physical voice, as well as her voice in a literary sense – that has often struck me as heroic. Heroic because it is reckless, stubborn.'
Give It Up
'I try to guess the book’s big idea and decide, well in advance of criticism or comprehension, whether or not the writing will be rich enough to entertain my friends when they ask, "Read anything good lately?"'
The New Threat from Islamic Militancy
'Islamic militants are of our time. They are in fact ahead of the curve very often. They were crowd-sourcing funding before the word was even invented.'
The Fantastications
'Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books. When I got home, I immersed myself in Southern fiction.'
The Decline of the Coffee to Stay
How could one ever feel pessimistic here? But then one day out went the beautiful iron-sided tables and comfortable chairs, and with them the people and all of their books.
‘It was like a ten-year stag party’
'Maths and numbers and abstraction, these all seem like very un-Irish things; but imagining other worlds, turning reality into a hall of mirrors, these are things we are very good at.'
A Guide for Writers Planning on Taking Up Residence at Shakespeare and Company in Paris
'You’ll understand you won’t get this soft bed for ever. Even the best Tumbleweeds can’t own their patches. There’s only one way, eventually, to achieve permanence in this place.'
Phantoms Over Paris
'It’s the New York Herald Tribune, Jean Seberg’s voice in the middle of traffic. It’s Romaine Bohringer and Elsa Zylberstein lolling on a bench at the top of a city hill, art and hope and tragedy ahead of them.'
Flight South
'Everything about swallows says ‘South’. They are a shiny, metallic, gregarious, nomadic tribe, decked in magenta and ravishing deep blues.'
On Roydon Fen
'This is a classic squatters’ landscape, and all the better for it. I always feel immediately at home in such makeshift places. Even the little palings have a Dickensian sort of attraction.'