The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
This wonderful novel made me ache to visit Syracuse just as Antony and Cleopatra took me to Egypt and Julius Caesar took me to Rome. Why? Because one of the most important characters in Syracuse Will Burn is Syracuse itself. In a highly effective narrative strand, the...
Welcome back to Aspects of History, Jim. You wrote your first novel, The Bratinsky Affair, late in life after a long and successful career. What prompted you to do so? I am originally from Northern Ireland and studied French and Spanish at Queen’s University Belfast....
I have been fascinated by the multi-cultural history of Sicily since I read Kingdom in the Sun by John Julius Norwich. When I first arrived in Sicily fifteen years ago, I was quite literally dazzled by a confusing and exotic mix of architectural styles, languages, and...
Welcome back to Aspects of History, Jim. The Bratinsky Affair, our Fiction Book of the Month, combines murder mystery, espionage thriller, and historical fiction. What first inspired the book, and how did the story evolve from that earliest conception? Serendipity...
A recent article in The Guardian featured a new book of short stories by Colm Tóibín: “Tóibín’s short stories, particularly in his 2026 collection The News from Dublin, are fundamentally concerned with exploring the internal and external lives of characters living at...
My short story City of the Damned traces the years of Hugh O’Neill's life from his defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 to his exile in Rome surrounded by spies, plots, and the threat of poison. This is the man who came closest to ending English rule in Ireland and...
The History behind The Bratinsky Affair "It is not the wimpled version of history that is interesting but its brutality." - Hilary Mantel The story of Countess Irina Bratinsky, née O’Rourke de Breffny, has its roots in the religious wars of 17th-century Ireland and...
At school I was an avid reader of history, including the swashbuckling adventures of the members of the O’Neill, O’Donnell and O’Rourke clans who used the strength of their sword arms to carve out positions of wealth and influence in their adopted homelands in...
The Bratinsky Affair is Jim Loughran’s debut novel. Set in 1976, the thrilling story unfolds through a dual perspective: one is Tom O’Brien, a closeted Irish journalist from Wicklow, seeking the story to prove his ability to his higher-ups, and Irina Bratinsky, a...
Jim Loughran, what first attracted you to the 1930s and beyond? The 1930’s were a turning point. I think back to my own mother who was born in 1911 when the German, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires still stood. The Second World War created a definitive break with...
