… We're from here, kid. Tiobraid Árann born and bred!

Oh yeah. Even here people get confused. I'm not sure why my mam chose probably the most confusing spelling! You can also find it as the Anglicized "Sive" (like the JB Keane play, and that's how you pronounce it), Sadbh, Sadhb or Sadb. She's used to getting letters addressed to every possible combination.

There's a couple. They're more Historically Awful than just regular bad, though.

I'm particularly sad about today, because my two sisters only came home yesterday from a week's holiday there. Sadhbh brought me a bookmark from the Musée d'Orsay and everything!

Given what I learned about Joyce from No Such Thing As A Fish, he'd just have started a fight, said, "Hemingway, sort this out!" and let Hemingway do the ejecting.

Don't worry, I assure you we were badmouthing your countrymen behind your back. We're not that polite.

Arguably, he just destroyed the assumption there was ever any difference between the two.

Yup. One of the things I learned in college is that you just can't properly judge a picture from a reproduction. The Night Watch, for instance, is 3m by 4m! It's bloody huge! In secondary school, I was looking at a reproduction about 4'' across and trying to write about it.

Why? I think Klimt's pretty amazing.

I never really knew Lee Krasner! (My lecturer was much more into the post-modernists, which is partly why I love Rauschenberg so much). Had a quick image search, must find more of her work.

(I got a "City of Death" reference here first!)

I've always found Seurat a bit off-putting. Pointillism feels very distancing, more of a technical exercise than anything else - but very impressive in that sense. I just don't get much more out of them.

My degree's in History of Art (well, half of it is, the other's in archaeology), so I can reasonably claim I know my way around paintings. And let me tell you, you'll see people complain about Abstract Expressionists, but see a Pollock or a Rothko in a proper environment (like the dark Rothko room in the Tate Modern)…

Of course not. Monet's got a good claim to being the starting point of all painting in the Twentieth Century. If you're not developing what he did, you're defying it, as it were.

Pfft. The Mona Lisa's not that great. I know for a fact it says "This is a fake" on the back in felt-tip.

I also did that, but The Night Watch is so big it's still pretty impressive.

We all do it sometimes.

Chuck Jones (supposedly). It's right there in the article.

On a related (and Dunkirk-related) note, I started watching the old BBC series Colditz. Good stuff. And there's something I love about the texture of old BBC series. Must be the video they were shot on.

You wish it was the Red Army. They actually had some principles. What you've got now is the gangster-capitalist Russia that you're at least partly responsible for creating.