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.

Curtis Sittenfeld: canny observation, sharp sketching and a seam of delightfully mordant humour.

Reviewed: Help Yourself by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the best short story writers around, and her relative ease with the medium is apparent from the off, in these three stories featuring her arty, finicky, preening and guileful characters.

Books • 28 Oct 20

Banner with pictures of people who went missing during the Franco dictatorship unveiled during a 2019 Madrid protest coinciding with the 83rd anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War.

Reviewed: The International Brigades by Giles Tremlett

In his latest work, an illuminating, surely definitive history, Giles Tremlett turns his attention to the International Brigades who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Books • 27 Oct 20

Seamus Heaney: RF Foster's work is born out of a long-held devotion to the poems

Reviewed: On Seamus Heaney by RF Foster

Roy Foster brings long-felt passion and measured scholarship to his welcome analysis of the poetry of Seamus Heaney

Books • 23 Oct 20

The writer Natalia Ginzburg pictured in 1988 in Turin, the city she grew up in.

Reviewed: Valentino and Saggitarius by Natalia Ginzburg

This pair of newly-issued novellas from the pen of the writer and parliamentarian, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) are authentic in pyschology, in dialogue and in atmosphere, with a kind of no-nonsense pragmatism about them.

Books • 19 Oct 20

Jake Stanley: from County Cork, by way of the North of England, a purveyor of fresh-sounding songs with an earthy fabric

Jake Stanley - Fix up Yer Courage, Fasten Yer Smile

Every song sounds individuated, considered, cherished on Jake Stanley's remarkable second album sung by a dream team, featuring Stanley's resonant vocal and Susanna Goodright's sweet harmonies.

Features • 15 Oct 20

Joszef Stalin: a flattering or emollient portrayal was not forthcoming from Comrade Krzhizhanovsky

Reviewed: Unwitting Street by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

The work of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is clever, playful and erudite in the way that the fiction of Flann O'Brien also is, being similarly surreal in its satire.

Book Review • 13 Oct 20

Brandon Taylor: a master of campus tension, played out by the lake on whose shores the university sits (Pic Bill Adams)

Reviewed: Real Life by Brandon Taylor

In Brandon Taylor's impressive Booker-shortlisted debut, Wallace, a gay biochemistry student of colour from Alabama finds himself negotiating the tricky terrain of white privilege - and indeed underprivilege - at an unnamed American mid-Western University

Books • 06 Oct 20

Poet and memoirist Gerald Dawe in his Belfast stomping ground (Pic: Bobby Hanvey)

Reviewed: Looking Through You by Gerald Dawe

It's entirely apposite that the poet Gerald Dawe should borrow most of the title of a Beatles song for his new memoir given that the arrival of The Beatles in Belfast in 1963 is accorded due reverence.

Books • 22 Sep 20

Federico Garcia Lorca: The writer was executed by a Nationalist firing squad in the early months of the Spanish Civil War.

Reviewed: Deep Song: The Life & Work of Lorca

Stephen Roberts' new study of the life and work of the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca is profoundly faithful in spirit to the poet's plays and poetry and the complex background from which his works emanated.

Books • 17 Sep 20

Irish actress Lauren Coe plays the beleagured young teenager Laurie in Nocturnal

Nocturnal upends the cliche about fatherhood and flight

Bleak and intense, Nocturnal is mildly creepy but curiously credible, upending the lazy cliche viz a viz so-called irresponsible fathers who, it is believed, scarper and ultimately forget.

Movie Review • 18 Sep 20