Greg Daly

Instructive in many ways, and surprising in some, there’s nothing in my September reading I wouldn’t recommend as long as you care about how our homes shape us, friendship, European integration, megalomaniac power, government shenanigans, and how a country can have its reputation blackened at speed.

With comics you are actually interacting with art, with drawings in a way you don't do even in animation. You read, think, read, think, repeatedly. Consider everything from the expression of the line to whatever thoughts the text evokes. As complex as you make it. The most active consumption of art.

What a time to be a Classics teacher, able to explain that classical Greeks didn’t do domes, that the Greeks had real issues with Achilles’ suicidal thirst for glory, that the American founding fathers favoured Greece over Rome, and ask whether ostracism could be a worthy tool. To start with!

Drogheda’s looking well this morning.

Good morning. Looks like Autumn’s finally kicking in. Drogheda looks well in the mist.

Somehow I never posted my August reading, which got bogged down after the profundities of the Pope’s encyclical on living in an AI world, such that it’s only now I’m finishing other books off. The Richter book on cultural continuity in Ireland’s first historical millennium, fwiw, is fascinating.

Well, it’s a dark day. Having hitherto had not even one book in our 7,000-strong collection written by somebody whose name begins with Q (though we have one edited by a Quinn, and a sketchbook by the supposed Quitely), I’ve bought our first authentic Q text. So far it seems good.

That was a fun trip to Manchester and Liverpool, where I revisited old haunts, some having changed immensely, others having stayed refreshingly familiar, visited what I hope will be regular spot in the years and decades to come, and spent glorious time in the company of so many wonderful people.

Always - always - tempting to be back on the Way of St James. Especially when we’ve brand new Camino waymarker here in Drogheda.

Having full rights to The Muppets and not just doing The Muppet Show again is like having control over every premiership football team and arguing over whether you should make them play snooker or all compete in some elaborate version of Ready Steady Cook.

It hasn’t been a bad week, all things considered, with charms of the week including a first encounter with a new neighbour, a delicious Sicilian dinner we missed out on in Sicily, meaningful new paintings up on the wall, and two collections of seventeenth-century Irish poetry got for a song.

Picked this up today. It’s impressive to see how clear-eyed Ireland was back in 1970 in its considerations of what joining the EEC would have meant. It’s striking how people nowadays act as though various developments since then were not on the cards from day one.

"He was perhaps less a political radical than a bohemian individualist, resentful of authority and restive with institutional restraints." Terry Eagleton on the politics of James Joyce: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... #SpéirGhorm

Good stuff today, but disappointing news too. My desktop sidekicks are of course advising that I should just plod on, and I will. In a bit.

It was excellent. And my description of it in advance proved more apt that I had expected.

Folks, I’m about to watch a film about Sisyphus suing his boulder. It looks great. I hope others come to see it.

My old blog is a neglected attic nowadays, but still, it seems as good a place as any share my thoughts on Nolan’s Odyssey, why I love how bland his Greek armour is, the wisdom of Xenia, and the lessons we should have learned from Andromeda and Memnon: thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.com/2026/08/an-o...

I think it’s been four years since I’ve last written anything for publication, life having taken a few turns over recent years, so it’s nice to be able to share my @plough.bsky.social debut: www.plough.com/articles/are...

Inferior eclipse yesterday. I’d been hoping for a full-on seagull-shadow-on-sun effect, as depicted on Dublin’s streets.

Just six books in July, which continued the holiday fiction trend with a great introduction to Deighton followed by the peerless Jackson. The Iliad essays were timely and superb, Dirda on Doyle was fun, Cicero on friendship was excellent, and the Bangor book was odd but definitely worthwhile.

Was tempted earlier by the idea that I could see The Odyssey a third time, this time on the Superduperimaxscreen when visiting London, but it seems every showing is sold out to the end of time. In fairness, it’s very good, and improves with the rewatching.

Nine books for June, including some regular fiction for a change. The Véliz book could be the most important book you’d read this year, while I can see why Daniel-Rops is regarded as a classic and the Maritain is something for anybody thinking of rebuilding a broken and corrupted world.

Looking forward to going to see Nolan’s take on The Odyssey next week, though it’s awful when people depict characters from poems set in Mycenaean times in Archaic Greek outfits and armour. (Or when they don’t go for the “Helen spent the war in Egypt, with a mere phantom in Troy” option.)

I’ll take “Things Dubliners would never say” for two hundred, please.

“Semiquincentennial” is an odd term, suggesting not a 250th anniversary but a halfway point on a journey to a 500th. There’s confidence there, anyway.

Syracuse proved an impressively theatrical place to visit. Can definitely recommend.

It’s striking that even now the phrase being used is “previously purchased Studio Canal content”. Not “previously purchased licenses to view Studio Canal content”. If the words “purchase” and “own” mean anything they surely exclude this kind of shenanigans, and I’m not sure how it’s legal.

It’s a bit tiring watching @ryanairofficial.bsky.social assigning passengers unsuitable for the emergency seats to them and having to do a dance to accommodate their passengers properly and safely, with their cabin baggage stranded. The app should enable passengers to opt out of those seats.

Just seven books in a less book-rich May than I’d hoped, though it was fun catching up with Saga which I’d been neglecting, and the other books were all worthwhile, with the one on the Cáin Adomnáin - which should be much better known - being particularly good.

There are very good reasons why the Vatican is saying that the big tech companies “exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life” and that it would be appropriate for States and transnational bodies to regulate and police them for the good of all.

Some familiar spots on the flight this morning: the Menai Strait flying over Anglesey; Llandudno and Conwy; Brighton with the wonderful charred skeleton of West Pier just about visible; and finally Paris, where I’m currently waiting for my train. Meetings are on the cards.

I’m finding this book deeply frustrating. It’s readable, and I’m learning a fair bit, but it makes bizarre claims about the natures of friendship in the past and even on its own terms it has vast gaps that undermine the landscape it’s trying to map.

Headline-writers at @irishtimes.com, the winner getting one-and-a-half times the points of the runner-up is not “pipping them at the post”. I mean, be fair.

Honestly, I don’t see what the Pope has against manuscripts. We have some cracking ones in Dublin. Printed books are clearly for rank modernists.

I’m doing well on the auld culinary multitasking nowadays. Lunches are proving especially productive on the reading front.

Five books for April, with finishing the depressingly timely Hannah Arendt and the often timeless Chesterton collection taking most of the month. The Batman book contained some fabulously spooky detective stories, while Boyer was fun and Bratten Weiss was seriously thought-provoking.