Donal Donnelly

A day in the life of Leopold Bloom, whose odyssey through the streets of turn-of-the-century Dublin leads him through trials that parallel those of Ulysses on his epic journey home.

It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this 'optimism' concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the 'all for the best' approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters - such as the recent earthquakes in Lima and Lisbon - not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging...

J.M. Synge, one of the greatest English language playwrites of the 20th century, immortalized the Aran Islands and its people with vivid written portraits that are among the greatest in modern literature. Synge's vibrant language and earthy themes breathtakingly capture the folklore and way of life that has since perished on these remote northen islands. As an aspiring writer in 1897, Synge was commanded by William Butler Yeats to, "Go to the Aran...

Three stories center on the anarchic tendency of the Irish to resist any kind of externally applied order. In the first story, an old man is marched off to jail for assaulting a seller of bad whisky; in the second, the passengers of a train gleefully sabotage the official timetable; in the third ('1921') a policeman lets a revolutionary escape during 'the troubles'.