MARIA DUARTE and JOHN GREEN review Michael, The North, Exit 8, Rose of Nevada
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On Seamus Heaney
RF Foster takes the measure of one of the most powerful wordsmiths of the 20th century
NATIONAL TREASURE: Seamus Heaney
GORDON PARSONS salutes the apt return of Brecht’s vaudevillian cartoon drama that retains the vitality of the boxing or the circus ring
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, John Luther Adams
Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
THIS survey of the life and work of the late Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s national poet and Nobel Laureate, was published in the month of John Hume’s death — another Nobel Prize winner and a schoolmate of Heaney’s — and the book gives a timely perspective on the Northern Irish Troubles as experienced and responded to in Heaney’s work.
Its author, historian RF Foster, charts Heaney’s developing awareness of the need to create form out of
the chaos of atrocity, not only in his writing but in his choices of allegiance and he chooses, beyond any cause, the independence of the artist in following the dictates of his art form.
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