Kevin Toolis is the author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA's Soul
On the outskirts of Tehran, deep within one of the largest graveyards in the world, Behest-e Zahra, is a singular tomb, a shrine to a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier Mohammed Hossein Fahmideh. It’s a tomb which holds a warning about the American war with Iran. Fahmideh was killed in October 1980 during the first battles
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For a gateway into hell, the innocuous brown wooden front door of 61 Freedom Street in downtown Riga is surprisingly narrow – just two feet across. Known as the Corner House, the two-foot-wide door into the old KGB Latvian HQ would be easy to miss amidst the wide boulevards and the ornate, art nouveau, balconied apartments
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On Wednesday, the lying in state for His Holiness Pope Francis began, with tens of thousands of mourners filing past his open casket in St Peter’s Basilica. In death before us, Pope Francis is still preaching his last sermon to the faithful; et tu in Arcadia ego. Death is always with us. When did you
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‘The mullahs are moody,’ said Aisha, a female university student, explaining her daily nail varnish run in with the aging female crones who guard the entrance to Tehran’s University of Arts. All female students had to pass through a daily ‘modesty’ check to reach their classes. But the line on what was acceptable – nail varnish
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At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, the new thing, the hot ticket, is being neurodiverse. Across comedy, stand up, magic and the spoken word it’s not so much Lady Macbeth as My Mental Health. Standing out in the chaos of the 3,000 plus shows of Edinburgh Fringe by being ‘different’ has always been the number one prerequisite
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Death’s great paradox is its inconstant constancy. Its forms and rituals change from generation to generation. In our own era, antibiotics have reduced the chance of a fatal infection, and average life expectancy has risen to our eighties. Direct cremation means we can even ship Auntie Maudie, when her time comes, to the crematorium sight
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The Edinburgh Festival is finally over, but why was this year’s event so obsessed with dying? Death is the new Black, at least according to the artists at the fringe where our mortality has been eviscerated, diced, disembowelled, deconstructed and fed back in a torrent of death shows to an army of avid theatre goers
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You never forget your first corpse, do you? Cold, visceral, mute, lying there immune from the world and its cares. But, for many people in Britain, seeing a dead body has become a rare spectacle – something that many of us may never see at all. Given that we will all one day die, this
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It was an overcast Sunday morning in January 1983 and two IRA gunmen were waiting outside Belfast’s St Brigid’s church. After attending mass, judge William Doyle was settling into the driver’s seat of his green Mercedes. He was hoping to escape the congregation throng when two Provisional IRA killers, wearing duffel coats with their hoods
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Along with death and taxes, life has only one other certainty: the DUP will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Fresh from insulting Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the annual St Patrick’s Day Washington jamboree as a man who needs to ‘read a history book’, the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson has now antagonised
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The fate of the Stormont Assembly, and a Brexit resolution of a kind, now rests on the uncharismatic shoulders of DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson and his judgment call on the Windsor Framework. If Donaldson declares the abstruse new EU trading arrangements on the enhanced flow of chilled meats to Ulster a victory, then Stormont will
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It is a question all good cardiologists must ask themselves every day: when do you stop trying to resuscitate the patient on the operating table? The same question could be asked of Stormont, Northern Ireland’s ever crisis ridden legislature: when do we stop bothering? In the latest round of life-saving treatment, His Majesty the King,
