Dublin

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Holy Orders, by Benjamin Black – review

It’s always a little disconcerting for the rest of us when literary novelists turn to crime. Have they become different writers? John Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize with The Sea, has published seven crime thrillers. He writes as Benjamin Black. He certainly looks different — Black has a matching author photo that shows a sinister figure resembling a melancholy Mafia hitman with half his face in shadow. Quirke, Black’s series protagonist, is a Dublin pathologist in the 1950s, not that there’s a great deal of medical detail in the novels. He refers to himself as ‘a consultant to the dead’ and, like Colin Dexter’s Morse, is known

Thursday

The Spectator

Good on you, Google – in praise of tax avoiders

Anyone who googled ‘tax avoidance’ this week will have been confronted (between adverts for accountancy firms) with endless stories about Google’s own tax avoidance schemes. If the company’s reputational management team was striving to stem the flood of bad publicity, it was not succeeding. Salvation for -Google arrived only when Apple’s tax avoidance became the big story instead. That is what the internet has created: a sometimes frightening, uncontrollable world in which information flows from place to place almost instantly and (mostly) unimpeded. Few would deny, however that the internet has had a benign and enriching influence on our lives overall. Government officials often become bogged down in discussions to

Thursday

Sophia Martelli

Travel: Dublin, comeback city

The boom and bust have left their mark on Dublin. Cruising through the outskirts past the (industrial) estate of Sandyford — flimsy-looking buildings, each as nastily designed as the last but in wildly different styles — I double-take at a gigantic half-built multi-storey car park. There are ‘To Let’ signs everywhere and it’s all a bit reminiscent of a Joni Mitchell song. But the shiny new Luas tram which links this monument to property development greed to the centre of the city is quiet, efficient and fast — and Dublin is, thank heavens, still the ‘fair city’ of the song, the Liffey meandering unruffled and majestic through the middle of