19 March 2026

The magnolias are making their all-to-brief appearance and the sun is shining. I shall be walking my dogs on Killiney Beach shortly and letting the decline of the west take place in my absence.

Picture of the Week

Harbour 3 (oil on board) from Francis Matthews’ new show opening the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin on 21 March. Matthews is the poet of puddles, of the dark corners of deserted streets. Pitch-perfect, atmospheric photo-realism.

The Moronic Inferno

Pam Bondi “a mean girl in legal drag”. Mary Geddry delivering le mot juste again. This time the target is the USA’s deeply compromised Attorney General.

“The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Bondi for a closed-door deposition on April 14, which is a problem for her because the whole routine works best on camera. Bondi thrives in the theatrical habitat of selective disclosure, sanctimonious scolding, and prop management. She likes burn-books, posture, and the general energy of a mean girl in legal drag. A closed-door deposition strips away the lighting, the rehearsed indignation, and the ability to wave around curated fragments while pretending they constitute openness. Under oath, without the usual production design, she may actually have to explain why the Justice Department’s idea of transparency keeps arriving with pages missing, names blacked out, and a suspicious odor of cleanup solution in the air.”

Read the full piece on Mary Geddry’s 8 March newsletter on Substack.

Musical Interlude

Elmore James had a short but successful career before dying suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 43 while in his prime. He was one of the leading exemplars of slide guitar and influenced many of the Sixties band: Duane Allman and Brian Jones were admirers. Dust My Broom showcases his talents in this direction. While the song lyrics are, to me, incidental to the music, they have aroused much speculation about the meaning of the phrase “dust my broom”. These range from quitting his current scene to various sexual activities. Given the usage of the times In Chicago, it seems that leaving an unfaithful partner is the message. But in art it’s always good to retain some ambiguity.

Dust my Broom by Elmore James .

Bedtime Reading

This is an extract from Stefan Collini’s review of T.S. Eliots Collected Letters Volume X. Read the full review in the London Review of Books (14 March 2026). Going through Eliot’s collected letters doesn’t provide much entertainment but there are moments. This one highlights an expensive piece of misjudgement by the great man.

“In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot ‘see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for’, but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript ‘have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time’. Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book ‘was a great mistake on our part’. Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. The rejection letter suggests that the book’s ‘positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing’, but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted.”

A Cheltenham Coda

That great harbinger of spring the Cheltenham Festival is sadly over. But never fear, Aintree and Punchestown are not far off. Aside from the supreme quality of the racing at Cheltenham (Lossiemouth, Gaelic Warrior et al), I had been having a bit of a betting disaster for the first two days. However, the wheel always turns and on Day 3 I redeemed all my earlier losses through Home by the Lee winning the Stayer’s Hurdle at 33-1. It was trained by the redoubtable Joseph O’Brien and was way to big a price to ignore considering its recent form and the problematic quality of the opposition. In the very next race my favourite trainer Henry de Bromhead provided me with another winner at 7-1 and suddenly I could do no wrong. Except I did and apart from a few placed horses that was it.

A Right Royal Twerp

Andrew O’Hagan’s demolition job on the erstwhile Prince Andrew and his gruesome wife Sarah is based an Andrew Lownie’s superb recent biography. (Lownie has also written the definitive biography of the Mountbattens - worth chasing up.) O’Hagan’s lively writing tells an astonishing story of entitlement and gleeful corruption. Here’s a flavour:

“In the days​ of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker, high on royal privilege but in touch with the inner life of the standard British male. ‘If he wasn’t a member of the royal family,’ the astrologer Russell Grant said, ‘his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun – with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.’ Among the prince’s early girlfriends were Koo ‘Starkers’ Stark and Vicki Hodge, an actress whose better-known works include The Studand Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.”

Read the entire piece in the 5-19 March edition of the London Review of Books.

A Morsel of Memoir

This Sporting Life

Because of the enclosed nature of the Campfield (where I lived from the age of 9) , and the numerous sporting options available, I tended not to stray beyond very much. I moved daily from its tennis courts of Collins Tennis Club to the pitch-and-putt course to the football fields and back again. Also, we had a grass strip across the road from our front gate, bordered by a sturdy hedge, where we played endless games of tip rugby. I look back with horror at the annoying little prick I must have been because I always insisted on taking conversions even though they were quite unnecessary and totally against the spirit of our free-flowing game. These kicks involved clearing the highest point of one of the bushes that marked the try line. Sorry Joe, sorry Robin.

Tennis was my forte. Our next door neighbours, the Phelans, gave me an old tennis racquet when I was ten and I took to the game with gusto. I remember playing in my first senior tournament when I was about twelve and having to learn how to serve over arm rather than underarm so as not to shame myself.

A slightly older boy from Sydney Park, (GG), started playing in Collins Tennis Club around the same time as me and we soon became constant playing partners. Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall were our heroes. GG was a serve and volley player like Hoad while I favoured the more subtle ground strokes of Rosewall – especially that effortlessly elegant backhand. Throughout my tennis career my backhand has always been my strongest feature – my forehand was basically for keeping the ball in play. A weakness that kept me a player or two below the best in the country at one stage. I was seeded number two in Ireland when I was under fifteen. But that’s another story and I’m not sure I want to go there yet.

I never really enjoyed rugby. I just wasn’t brave enough. I had the skills, sure hands and a reasonable kick including the unusual ability to use both legs. However, all this comes to naught when you fight shy of the physical contact. Also, I never really found my optimum position. I went from hooker, to second row, to wing forward and then out to the backs as my peers outgrew me. I ended up on the wing – a lonely post designed for the blind, the lame and the halt in our day. Occasionally large boys would burst through and come in my direction. I would flail at them ineffectually and on they would proceed. My kicking skills got me on the school seconds at out half on one auspicious occasion. We went up to Cashel to play the rough boys of Rockwell. They slaughtered us and I was made a scapegoat. Early on I was moved from out-half to full-back and, after a particularly egregious missed tackle, I was demoted to wing forward. That really marked the end of my school rugby career although for some forgotten reason I made a comeback for the UCC minors and spent a number of practice matches avoiding the great Irish centre Jerry Walsh who played for the UCC seniors at the time. I broke my wrist in one of those matches and on returning the following year broke it again. So that was that. An inglorious chapter in my sporting life came to and end. (To be continued next week.)

Poetry Corner

Roger Casement was a hero for his exposure of colonial cruelty in the Congo and Peru and history acknowledges his contribution. His involvement in the Easter Rising however was ill-judged and ill-informed.Trying to recruit Irish prisoners-of-war to fight against their erstwhile colleagues was foolish. He should never have been executed and wouldn’t have been had the Brits not played homosexual card.

The Ghost of Roger Casement by W.B. Yeats

O WHAT has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea's roar?
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his day,
The country thinks no end of him,
For he knows how to say,
At a beanfeast or a banquet,
That all must hang their trust
Upon the British Empire,
Upon the Church of Christ.
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

John Bull has gone to India
And all must pay him heed,
For histories are there to prove
That none of another breed
Has had a like inheritance,
Or sucked such milk as he,
And there's no luck about a house
If it lack honesty.
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.