Bryan Dobson

speaker

128 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4 Jul

Bryan Dobson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Brendan O'Connor · Summer Holiday Book Recommendations “It’s Sinead’s memoir, and she’s reading it – it’s very intimate” · 4 Jul 2026 podcast

The troubles are on.

There's no work.

There's nothing for him.

He kind of on a whim joins the police, the RIC, becomes involved in the War of Independence on the RIC side and for various reasons becomes a marked man, has to flee the town.

And spends the rest of his life wandering the world.

And it's the whereabouts of Enos McNulty.

He ends up in the Second World War, taking part in that.

He then is in Africa for a while.

And his life, because it's his life story, so in the end he dies, ends in London where he's running a kind of a guest house for homeless people, drifters like him.

And I think what's interesting is it's an unremarkable life and yet it's made remarkable by being turned into this story.

So it puts a spotlight on somebody who otherwise, you know, as so many of us are, you know, we go through our lives and there's no great fanfare and it begins as a middle and there's an end.

And I just think it's a lovely story.

And it's an Irish story as well because so many people for various reasons, not necessarily this reason, ended up as exiles from their home place.

No.

Well, she's not too judgmental about him.

But what she does is she writes these effectively six separate biographies of these women, two of whom he was married to, two of whom he had children with, who had a walk on parts, if you like, in Picasso biographies over the years.

So she puts the spotlight on these women who were remarkable in their own way.

You know, Francois Guillot was a painter and is increasingly respected for the work that she did.

Dora Maar was a photographer and a painter and in fact may have had a hand, according to this, in the Guernica, the famous Picasso painting of the bombing during the Civil War.

And so they're all women that had an impact.

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