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Colm Toibin

Up with this I shall not put!

In his brilliantly disturbing novella, The Testament of Mary (ostensibly about the mother of Christ but arguably about the inevitable unhappiness of mother-love), Colm Toibin articulates very well the dilemma of choosing between a righteous course of action and the more pressing demands of self-preservation: I watched in horror, but I did not move or […]

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Tell me about it

Where does our desire to tell stories come from? What exactly is it that we are trying to articulate and what fuels the conviction that there is an audience for the tales we tell? It’s surely not just a by-product of ego, a desire to impose ourselves on the world, an inner compulsion towards self-assertion.

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