Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: the Troubles in my Home Place is a powerful mixture of memoir, journalism and history. In it, the lives of people murdered in a single parish during the Troubles are given due attention.
Read MoreNotes and links for a webinar via Tralee Education Support Centre, for teachers of Hamlet at Leaving Certificate.
Read MoreChristopher Youles’s Sentence Models for Creative Writing is a useful short book for English teachers, properly sub-titled ‘A practical resource for teaching writing.’
Read MoreNotes on the Hamlet chapter in Emma Smith’s This is Shakespeare.
Read MoreA simple way to help pupils understand which parts of a play are important for revising an individual character. Here, Hamlet, but any play by Shakespeare works.
Read MoreLaura Cumming’s marvellous Thunderclap: a memoir of art and life & sudden death mulls over our gaps in the knowledge of the artist Carel Fabritius, but it is about so much more, especially her father, the Scottish artist James Cumming.
Read MoreGabriel Josipovici’s commentary in Hamlet: Fold on Fold is consistently stimulating and thought-provoking, and blessedly free of academic jargon.
Read MoreJason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello is a thought-provoking collection of poems.
Read MoreThe argument for the most ‘important’ subject in school being … poetry.
Read MoreWilliam Wall’s latest novel, Empty Bed Blues, is the story of an Irishwoman whose life has been torn apart by her husband’s betrayals . A small town in Liguria in Northern Italy helps her see how she might live again.
Read MoreThe second edition of the RSC Shakespeare Complete Works edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen is well-worth buying.
Read MoreMartha Dickinson Bianchi’s Emily Dickinson: Face to Face is a brilliant evocation of her aunt’s life next door in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Read MoreThe authors in Kate Jones’s selection of essays looking at the basics of cognitive science explain key concepts in a valuably accessible way.
Read MoreRos Atkins’s The Art of Explanation: how to communicate with clarity and confidence is a fascinating fine-grained account of how he has reached the status of one of broadcasting’s most impressive ‘explainers’.
Read MoreIdeas for the use of a Ros Atkins ‘explainer’ in English class.
Read MoreSome comments on the recent NCCA ‘Report on the role of prescribed text lists in Junior Cycle and Leaving Certificate English and the processes involved in text selection.’
Read MoreDeborah Levy’s new novel August Blue will give pleasure to all who enjoyed her superb three-book ‘living autobiography.’
Read MorePerspectives on the Teaching of English in Post-Primary Education, edited by Kevin Cahill and Niamh Dennehy, is a comprehensive and valuable collection of essays on the way the subject is taught and studied in Ireland.
Read MoreGreg Ashman’s Cognitive Load Theory in the Little Guide for Teachers series is a lucid short book on this important idea.
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