Paddy Kehoe

Multimedia Journalist

Paddy Kehoe has been working in journalism for 27 years. A former teacher, he began his career with In Dublin and Magill magazines, and he wrote theatre reviews for the Sunday Tribune and film reviews for Irish Stage & Screen magazine.

Reviewed: These Silent Mansions by Jean Sprackland

Jean Sprackland, a poet who has enjoyed previous success in prose with Strand: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach is it would be fair to say, addicted to graveyards in her engaging new work.

Books • 09 Mar 20

The Quarry: stories from a functional-dysfunctional estate told in linked stories

Reviewed: The Quarry by Ben Halls

Unable to do much more than protest at the meagre quality of their lives, Ben Halls's characters boldly rattle the bars of urban entrapment in wonderful stories, most of which are set in the eponymous council estate near London.

Books • 27 Feb 20

Gerard Smyth: his tenth collection of poetry resonates with loving images from his Dublin heartland

Reviewed: The Sundays of Eternity by Gerard Smyth

Gerard Smyth works quiet miracles in the numinous, tender poems abounding in his tenth collection, poems which celebrate his Dublin heartland, venturing out too to Cork, Sligo and Portugal and elsewhere, with verses for friends, living still or passed.

Poetry • 26 Feb 20

Album review: Aaron Diehl – The Vagabond

Pianist Aaron Diehl's The Vagabond refers to what he calls his 'itinerant (musical) existence', venturing ouas he has done from the Julliard School through African-American traditions, taking in Gershwin, Prokofiev and Philip Glass on the ongoing journey

Music • 26 Feb 20

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, with Adele Haenel and Noémie Merlant

Breton passion in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a cool, almost ascetic work exploring sexual repression and sexual longing - sides perhaps of the same 18th century French coin - between two young women, an artist and her portrait subject

Movies • 02 Mar 20

You want it darker? Then you got Downhill

Will Ferrell plays it dark in Downhill

This thought-provoking remake of Ruben Östlund's 2014 Swedish-language film Force Majeure deftly juggles dark passages with oddly comic counterbalance

Movies • 25 Feb 20

Dried goods vendor, Pakistan. Rosita Boland had some nerve-wracking experiences in the mountains.

Reviewed: Elsewhere by Rosita Boland

Vividly written, wryly humorous and most of all honest, Elsewhere is a tonic of a travel book from journalist Rosita Boland, now out in paperback.

Books • 24 Feb 20

Harrison Ford as John Thornton and his beloved dog Buck in The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild is doggone good

This fascinating adaptation of Jack London's classic 1903 novel, set in Canadian Yukon territory in the 1890s is a must-see.

Movies • 19 Feb 20

Alison Light and her husband Raphael on their wedding day in 1987

Reviewed: A Radical Romance by Alison Light

Alison Light's revealing memoir details in its last third the sense of acute desolation the writer and critic felt following the death of her husband, the Communist historian Raphael Samuel, who died in 1997, aged 62.

Books • 17 Feb 20

Jihad Jane aka Colleen R LaRose following her release from prison as she appears in Ciaran Cassidy's documentary

Jihad Jane and the Waterford link in new documentary

Ciaran Cassidy's fascinating documentary, Jihad Jane, hears the stories of two American women who were imprisoned following charges related to terrorist conspiracy in 2010.

Movies • 17 Feb 20