Search Results for 'Lilliput Press'

During her first visit to Ireland while walking the road from Oranmore to Loughrea, Aesnath Nicholson, a lone witness to the growing desperation of the poor as successive years of the Great Famine took its frightening toll, stopped to rest her blistered feet. She leant against a wall and thought about the advice her friends had given her in America. They told her the trip was reckless and she would damage her health. Yet even at that moment she asked herself: Would she rather be back in her parlour in New York?

Week III

Some months after Lady Christobel Ampthill’s spectacular accident (her horse who refused to jump a flooding stream, and she was thrown into the river, and nearly drowned), Michel Déon and his wife Chantal, came across her sitting in her car near Kinvara.* She clearly looked distressed. There was a rumour that she had not fully recovered from her accident. She was getting forgetful.

I do not know the statistics, but I feel sure that the greatest number of our continental visitors come from France. During the summer you hear and see a lot of French people clutching maps of our small city, wandering about in groups; or lines of young students talking and gesturing happily among themselves, not paying the least attention to their guide. The French are not operatic like the Italians. They share beautiful sounding words; but the face is serious. I feel there is something of Old Europe in the French language.

IN THE late sixties, when a French author and revered member of the Academie Francaise, Michel Déon, came to County Galway with his wife Chantal, he probably had no idea he would spend the remainder of his life - spanning almost a half of a century - here, and that Galway was where he would pass away.

Artists can be very awkward at times. They don’t always conform to decisions made on their behalf. They rarely behave nicely if they disagree with authority.

The Great Famine of 1845-51 was, the Galway historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh tells us*, ‘a subsistence crisis, and a social calamity without parallel in the 19th century. It resulted in more than 1,000,000 dying of starvation and related diseases; and it ‘precipitated a virtual tidal wave of emigration that would see 4,000,000 flee the country during the following 20 years’. 

STARTING IN the early seventies and continuing for about 20 years, there was a continuous migration into Galway of extraordinary “blow ins” whose genius and drive transfigured the cultural life of the city.

It was something of a red letter day at Kenny’s Gallery last Friday with the dual launch of a major new exhibition by sculptor John Behan, and a terrific book celebrating the artist, by NUIG’s Adrian Frazier, entitled John Behan: The Bull of Sheriff Street - The Life and Work of an Irish Sculptor and published by Lilliput Press.

"SOME OF those who already know about John Behan would think of him as without question a Dubliner. For others, after forty years there, he is a fundamental part of Galway."