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“Walking down through Baixa from the hotel, Morgan crossed Rua doArsenal, the street where Capitão Salgueiro Maia had confronted units ofa tank-brigade loyal to the Caetano regime – main-battle tanks, as big asdinosaurs in a museum, gunning their engines in plumes of blue exhaust –climbing down from his armoured car, his arms raised high above his head,walking under the muzzles …

As they turned off the main road through tunnels of overhanging branches, the landscape opened up into broad stretches of parkland, mapped out by stone walls and stands of trees, rising in soft folds. At a cross-roads, Andy jerked his head to the right. “Whatsisname lives up that way,” he said. “You know, Cameron. Big place, drove past it with …

Today I watched a tv news item on the closure of the border with Spain and, collaterally, of the pilgrimage route to Santiago, and it struck me that here was a tiny filament in the incomprehensibly complex web of fractures in the life of the world: like the shattered screen of a mobile phone, but not so easy to replace.

EXIT 16 is just somewhere on a motorway, in grey weather

A film noir drizzle is spangling the windows tonight, puddles fragmenting the street below, the wet sweep of traffic like windscreen wipers: reveal and erase, erase and reveal.

“…that low-grade xenophobia that is never far below the surface in the English psyche; a dull and petulant hatred of the whole world, but especially of Europe. People talk about Ireland’s deadly affair with history, the gloomy steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone, but really it is England that has the dismal and corrupting preoccupation with the past. Sometimes you feel …

    © Chris Keil 2012 “RED HAMMER” A play by Dave Leaper ACT ONE SCENE ONE As the lights come up on a stretch of isolated country road, we hear the sounds of a bus pulling away from a stop – hiss and clap of the door, EEH-AW screech of a klaxon, the roar of the motor shifting up …

My publisher, Mark Brady of Cillian Press, has just launched  Cillian Editing Services – brilliant, innovative, setting a  new standard of excellence. Check it out at: cillianeditingservices.co.uk

From my balcony, the enigmatic, silent, meditative movements of a crane, high above a building site a few blocks away; like Christ in Majesty

I posted this on my publisher’s website a little over seven years ago. The pestilence has been far more deadly than I ever imagined. I spent the last days of the summer as a writer in residence at La Torre de Dalt, in Catalunya; a beautiful medieval building, a little palace of marble floors, elaborate dark mirrors and vaulted ceilings, …

The Captains had paid their dues for years in Africa. They had acquired the skills they needed to change the world – to rebuild it closer to the heart’s desire – at great personal expense, at the cost of many deaths, of many friends, in a pointless war.