A posthumous plea from Hubert O'Hearn, an author, writer and literary agent with a kind heart.

An early contender for the novel of the year.

As I may have mentioned one or two hundred times before, Belfast and particularly its thriving arts scene is the best-kept secret in the UK. What I find remarkable about that statement, which I find as easy to state as the current weather conditions, is how often I have to...

I am not going to assume that you have already seen the confrontation two weeks ago between Senator Dianne Feinstein and a group of schoolchildren over the (no pun intended, at least not by me) green paper proposals collectively titled the Green New Deal. As we live in a time...

The only moments in life that count for something are the exceptions. Mondays are Mondays just as Tuesdays blend into every other Tuesday except for the Wednesday that wasn’t a Wednesday because it was the day when, like the title of Joe Heller’s oft-neglected yet brilliant novel, Something Happened. For...

This may well come as a shock to your beliefs so reach out and hold close something you love dearly, but serve it straight and in a shot glass for the truth will brittle your bones into icicles. As my father said, in the only letter that one professional writer...

Writing anything at all about The Beatles is rather like writing anything at all about God or Marxism – the subject is so vast, with so many entry points leading to a land filled with hedge rowed mazes each begging exploration, that if one isn’t intimidated by the prospect one...

Even Abraham Maslow missed the most important human point. When that renowned American psychologist, studied by virtually every social sciences student ever since he published his 1943 paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, listed his pyramid of human needs he stated that at its base the edifice was founded upon...

A pithy observation to start: Everything you have ever found funny involved pain. Everything, no exceptions, from the cradle to the wise-cracking hospice nurse, involved pain. An infant in its cradle giggles at the huge face looming over it because the baby’s eyes are still learning to focus and after...