International – Page 25 – For the fainthearted . . .

Nobel wobbliness

In 2007, A.N. Wilson questioned the worth of Nobel prizes for literature. He suggested that if one was compelled to write a history of Twentieth Century referencing only Nobel laureates, it would be a challenge. The work of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats has stood the test of time, but how many readers are there who still read the work of John Galsworthy or Pearl Buck? More controversially, Wilson suggested that Seamus Heaney and Toni Morrison might similarly become writers whose work would have disappeared from the literary landscape in …

A different Anchor

It was not hard to remember the jingle, it accompanied the advertisement on Westward and HTV television in the 1970s. A hornpipe tune to an advertisement for butter might have seemed odd, what had seafaring tunes to do with dairy products? The answer was that Anchor butter came from New Zealand.

An internet search revealed that the jingle ran to two stanzas. It may have been poetry worthy of William McGonagall, but it achieved its purpose of lodging Anchor butter firmly in the mind of even a schoolboy who had …

Lingering sunflowers

Although it is beginning to bow its head, there is still a single sunflower in full bloom in the next door neighbour’s garden. It seems an act of defiance, a declaration that, though today might be Michaelmas, summer refuses to die. Vincent might have been pleased at such a sight.

His was one of those names learned at primary school that did not sound as a primary class usually read it; our best efforts usually sounded like the English name “Gough”, we never quite mustered Dutch gutturals. It is odd …

Freudian denials

“Psychoanalysis” is the Word of the Week at school. The word was chosen because today marks the eightieth anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis was born in 1856 and died on this day in 1939.

Students were invited to note that Freud established links between the conscious and the unconscious parts of the mind. There was no mention of how circular were many of the arguments developed by Freud.

Studying Sigmund Freud, seemed about the hammering of facts into a shape that fits the theory. …

Truth is stranger than parody

Earlier this month the Belfast newspaper the Irish News had to issue an apology after quoting from the Twitter account “Ian Paisley MP.” It transpired that they had quoted from a parody account. The problem faced by the Irish News is that the allegations surrounding the Democratic Unionist Party are such that it is difficult to discern what is truth and what is parody: stories include the Renewable Heat Initiative, in which the more fuel farmers burned the more they were paid; and the sale of land valued at £75 …

Send in the clowns

Clowns have for centuries been regarded as subversive. Shakespeare thought them so, he uses clowns to express thoughts that others might not articulate. In the script of the closing act of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, the two gravediggers are called “First Clown” and “Second Clown.” They discuss the death of Ophelia, who had thrown herself into the river, pondering if Ophelia had drowned herself in self-defence and sceptical that someone from a less powerful family would have received the rites of the church. The Second Clown declares:

Will you ha’ the

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