Thomas O'Dwyer became a journalist after 12-years as a Royal Air Force officer. He was an analyst for the Beirut-based Arab Press Service, then chief editor of The Cyprus Mail in Nicosia. Reuters hired him as bureau chief of their first office in Cyprus. He worked as a Reuters correspondent across the Middle East and lived two years in Bahrain and Dubai. He covered the Lebanese war, terrorism and hijackings, and the Iran-Iraq tanker war. The Jerusalem Post hired him as foreign editor and gave him a personal column. He covered the Kuwait war, the first Palestinian uprising, and the Holy Land pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II. He has been a columnist with the International Herald Tribune and has written freelance for The Guardian, the Economist Intelligence Unit and openDemocracy magazine. He has also broadcast reports for Ireland's RTÉ radio. Email: thomas [at] odwyer.com
Website: http://www.thomasodwyer.com/
by Thomas O’Dwyer “I just love the smell of an old book,” the American tourist drawled as she paid for a purchase in Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. After she left, the curmudgeonly owner, George Whitman, growled to no one in particular, “I wish people would stop talking about smelling fucking books. They’re for…
by Thomas O’Dwyer The Nobel Prize season is almost upon us and writers who cover the events are poised as usual to see if the awards ride in on any juicy scandals. In particular, we’re watching you, Peace and Literature. This pandemic year’s winners will have no glitter to adorn their prizes, no lavish dinners,…
by Thomas O’Dwyer A statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John MacDonald, has become the latest lump of kitsch concrete to hit the ground after protesters pulled it from a plinth in Montreal and cheered as the head broke off and bounced across the pavement. (MacDonald was linked to vicious policies that killed and…
by Thomas O’Dwyer A book subtitled A Novel of the Plague might appear opportunistic at this time. But in Maggie O’Farrell’s new and much-praised Hamnet, the only opportunity the author seems to be taking advantage of is our ignorance of the life of William Shakespeare. “Miraculous,” The Guardian wrote, “a beautiful imagination of the short…
by Thomas O’Dwyer Our world (made of atoms) is crammed with paradoxes. Particles act like waves, waves like particles And your cat can be dead and alive at the same time. Just step through your looking glass and welcome to the quantum world. “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you haven’t understood quantum mechanics,” the…
by Thomas O’Dwyer After suffering the injury of pandemic isolation for most of the year, the pride of Dublin city had insult added in May when a national treasure, Bewley’s Café, announced that its doors would be closed not just for the lockdown, but forever. Public outrage rippled out of the city and across the…
by Thomas O’Dwyer It seemed like a good idea. What better time than a pandemic lockdown to tackle again a feat that no human has so far accomplished and yet which seems to require nothing more than a comfortable chair, fingers that can turn pages, and a slice of uninterrupted time. It was another perfect…
by Thomas O’Dwyer With most of the planet under curfew, now might be a good time to ask, where’s my freedom of choice suddenly gone? Who (or what) determined, in some detail, how billions of us should act and behave for the foreseeable future? A troublesome ancient duo has returned – free will and its…
by Thomas O’Dwyer Across Europe, the doors of museums and art galleries, along with the gates of sports stadiums, are being slammed shut by the Covid-19 pandemic. This week, the oldest museum in Belgium, The Fine Arts Museum of Ghent, was among them. This is sad for it will prevent tens of thousands of art…
by Thomas O’Dwyer Is there anything more depressing than the happiness industry? Never mind Google, just check out Amazon Books for something to read about this mental snake-oil, and just look at that — “50,000 results for Happiness.” With so much advice available, it’s hard to grasp how there could be any misery left in…
by Thomas O’Dwyer We still recall the 1920s as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age. Not many will know that the decade which began 200 years ago with U.S. President James Monroe in office was the Era of Good Feelings, a name coined by a Boston newspaper. In 1820, a presidential election year, Monroe…
by Thomas O’Dwyer It could have been that simple — the Nazis nuke Washington D.C. and it’s all over. Capitulation follows, resistance is futile. There are plenty of right-wingers in high places — political, military, even cultural, who see this not as a conquest but an opportunity. French Marshal Philippe Pétain and Norway’s Vidkun Quisling…
by Thomas O’Dwyer The Prophet was sleeping when the call to afternoon prayer rang out across the town. He woke and reached for his prayer robe but a cat was curled up on an outstretched sleeve. A servant moved to shoo the animal away, but the Prophet raised his hand and motioned for the servant…
by Thomas O’Dwyer The outpouring of words after the passing of literary critic Harold Bloom on October 14th was astonishing. Who knew that an 89-year-old American academic who still muttered about things like great literary canons and dead white male Victorian-era poets could cause such a ripple in self-absorbed 21st-century space-time? However, the eulogies, obituaries,…
by Thomas O’Dwyer One of the few pleasures left in modern travel is to visit an unfamiliar place and to attempt to feel its historical and cultural pulse – if it still has one. The British author Lawrence Durrell endlessly sought the “spirit of place” in his travels. He developed the rare talent of being…
by Thomas O’Dwyer Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro fired the head of the agency which monitors Amazon deforestation. “Fired” is an unfortunate word here – flames sweep across the country and down into Bolivia. Scientists and environmentalists have been alarmed by how quickly their predictions, that Bolsonaro’s aggressive anti-conservation agenda would boost deforestation, have come to…
by Thomas O’Dwyer The first real work of art I ever saw was Auguste Renoir’s Les Parapluies. I was a teenager, and the painting had arrived in Dublin following a 1959 agreement between the governments of Ireland and Britain. This they had signed to solve an arts wrangle as tortuous as the Greek Elgin Marbles…
by Thomas O’Dwyer Mother’s friend departed after their weekly get-together for tea, cakes and gossip, but she forgot to take her book. It was a slim hardback with the blue and yellow banded cover of a subscription book club. It lay on the arm of the sofa for ten minutes and then, before anybody noticed,…
by Thomas O’Dwyer Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not so much a book of fantastic adventures as a book of conversations (and pictures). It’s right there, in the first paragraph: “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Lewis Carroll and his illustrator John Tenniel delivered just that, a magical…
by Thomas O’Dwyer The enigma of the castaway existed long before Robinson Crusoe was published 300 years ago in April 1719, but nothing had ever enthralled the growing reading public of his time like Daniel Defoe’s now classic novel. And, thanks to Defoe, the curse of the desert-island cartoon remains with us – a circular…