What I Read This Week: ‘Brilliant writing is all about small details’ (2024)

Hello from the sports desk, where it feels like everyday is Saturday at this time of year. We’re on All-Ireland hurling weekend, which means we’re also on Euro 2024 quarter-final weekend, which means we’re also on First Test v South Africa weekend and Wimbledon and the Tour De France and more and more and more. Sport never stops – but it particularly doesn’t stop in July.

But the world doesn’t stop either, obviously. So here are a few of the bits and bobs that have caught my eye this week while I procrastinated from attending to all the fun stuff.

1 Our friends across the water had themselves an election on Thursday, meaning a lot of bleary eyes and tired heads around the place throughout Friday. I always enjoy these huge, epochal events, particularly because newspapers take them so seriously and they tend to bring about such deeply-researched reporting. Mark Paul’s profile of the new British prime minister Keir Starmer fits the bill here – there’s so much in here that I didn’t know about Starmer’s background and the things that drove him to Friday’s momentous result.

2 I’m not normally that quick to pick up travel pieces – it’s a blind spot, I admit. I think I’m just never all that interested in anyone’s account of their holiday. But something about Kevin Power’s piece detailing his week at Center Parcs grabbed me immediately. Probably the fact that I have been there with my family (and loved it) sparked my curiosity. But once I started reading, I enjoyed the fatherly dread immensely and felt entirely seen.

3 This isn’t really a sports piece, even though it appeared in our sports section. Sonia O’Sullivan’s daughter Sophie won the 1,500m at the national Athletics Championships last Sunday so we asked her to write about how that felt for Ireland’s greatest ever athlete. Sonia is so matter of fact about these things – it was only afterwards that she realised that she and Sophie will become the first mother and daughter combination to run for Ireland at the Olympics when Sophie goes to Paris next month. The piece is Sonia to the last full-stop – informative, expert, lovely.

4 When I heard that Paul Howard’s basset hound Humphrey died a while back, I pretty much knew instinctively that he would probably write about it at some stage. When he did, it was everything you’d expect from one of Ireland’s most affecting writers – kind, funny, sad. Brilliant writing is all about small details and nobody has a better eye for them than Paul does. The photos are heartbreaking too.

5 Okay, this one kind of is about sport. Well, kind of about a kind of sport. Dave Hannigan’s column about Conor McGregor’s latest piece of nonsense is reliably scathing. So long out of the octagon now that he must surely forget what it looks like, McGregor has been combining the fiction that he will ever fight again with a recent wheeze endorsing some kind of bare-knuckle caper. Dave is having none of it.

Best of the rest

We’ll finish where we started. The greatest treat of British politics over the past decade has, of course, been the consistently incredible Marina Hyde in The Guardian. For some, the British election was only complete when Starmer walked to the lectern and gave his speech on Friday lunchtime. For the rest of us, it wasn’t done until Marina’s verdict on the whole thing landed soon after.

Best line? “Meanwhile, it’s incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we’d eradicated measles and Nigel Farage. Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.”

Magnificent.

And finally, across the other pond, there has been so much hand-wringing over the past 10 days about Joe Biden’s age that it feels impossible for there to be a fresh angle to it all. But I liked this piece by well-known media commentator Brian Seltzer on vox.com – a deep dive into how and why (and, indeed, if) the US media had messed up in its coverage of the US president’s mental state over the past few years.

Nothing is ever simple, in any subject. My favourite pieces are generally the ones that lay out the extent to which things are nuanced and tangled, even if they don’t come to any great solution.

Most read this week:

1 Michael McGrath: ‘Nothing is ever as it seems. We’ve ended up with seven children, but we had loss along the way’

2 Mother and daughter killed in Co Mayo crash named locally

3 A week in Center Parcs in Longford: Standing in the forest, you feel the money draining gently out of your bank account

4 Canadian tourist dies after assault on Dublin’s O’Connell Street

5 Paul Howard: I never loved an animal as much as I loved Humphrey. For 13 and a half years, he was my constant companion

The week ahead

It’s All-Ireland hurling semi-final weekend. We’ll be in Croke Park to find out of Cork can stop Limerick on their way to a five-in-a-row and to see if Clare can finally overcome Kilkenny. Read Seán Moran, Denis Walsh, Gordon Manning, Nicky English and me over the next few days to keep up with it all.