It is not a rule of journalism but it should be. Writing anything at all about the various conflicts in the Middle East, with all their shifts and shapes and connected parts moving like the patterns in a kaleidoscope tube with absolutely none of the beauty, invites the fate of...
Being curious about curiosity truly does sound like something out of Alice in Wonderland, whose lead character was observed saying 'curiouser and curiouser' about Mad Hatters, talking playing cards and the like. Although you know, if the Queen of Hearts leaps out of the desk and starts crying 'Off with...
On the whole I rather enjoyed my writing career. I phrase that in the past tense as there are only two possible outcomes after sending in this commentary: my editor at The London Economic responds with purple-faced rage at my effrontery in assuming that this publication would ever under any...
Let us speak then of victimless crimes, the pretense that somehow by expunging certain acts from the criminal justice system we are in fact advancing civilization, casting aside the repressions, the myths, the lies our churches told us for centuries upon centuries that those acts were evil when of course...
Settle back and relax with a nice warm beverage as I'm going to tell you a story. Back in the mid-1980s when I was an eager young man with a passion for politics, the Liberal Party of Canada sent me to an intensive training conference for campaign management. The keynote...
There is a reason I love short stories as much as I do. Show me a city, I'll write you a novel; read me a short story and you sing the whole planet. Yes I know that seems counter-instinctual. After all, how can three hundred or three thousand words possibly...
If I might go out on a limb, there is a bit of wisdom learned through observation that I think the comedian and author Sara Pascoe and I hold in common as both truth and strategy. It is, if you want an audience to take you seriously make them laugh...
By Hubert O'Hearn and Bianca Da Silva This Belfast Book Festival has proven so far to be an absolute joy, with the only debate being what has been the most thought-provoking: Is it the discussions and readings in the various workshops, or the spontaneous chats in the Crescent Arts Centre...
Hubert O'Hearn with Bianca da Silva We were somewhere around Belfast on the edge of the Mourne Mountains when the rains began to take hold. I remember saying something like "We'll still be on time ; absolutely you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us...