iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Drogheda’s looking well this morning.

Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Instructive in many ways, and surprising in some, there’s nothing in my September reading I wouldn’t recommend as long as you care about how our homes shape us, friendship, European integration, megalomaniac power, government shenanigans, and how a country can have its reputation blackened at speed.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Good morning. Looks like Autumn’s finally kicking in. Drogheda looks well in the mist.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Somehow I never posted my August reading, which got bogged down after the profundities of the Pope’s encyclical on living in an AI world, such that it’s only now I’m finishing other books off. The Richter book on cultural continuity in Ireland’s first historical millennium, fwiw, is fascinating.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Well, it’s a dark day. Having hitherto had not even one book in our 7,000-strong collection written by somebody whose name begins with Q (though we have one edited by a Quinn, and a sketchbook by the supposed Quitely), I’ve bought our first authentic Q text. So far it seems good.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

That was a fun trip to Manchester and Liverpool, where I revisited old haunts, some having changed immensely, others having stayed refreshingly familiar, visited what I hope will be regular spot in the years and decades to come, and spent glorious time in the company of so many wonderful people.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Always - always - tempting to be back on the Way of St James. Especially when we’ve brand new Camino waymarker here in Drogheda.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I like them. They complement other shelves elegantly.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

It hasn’t been a bad week, all things considered, with charms of the week including a first encounter with a new neighbour, a delicious Sicilian dinner we missed out on in Sicily, meaningful new paintings up on the wall, and two collections of seventeenth-century Irish poetry got for a song.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Picked this up today. It’s impressive to see how clear-eyed Ireland was back in 1970 in its considerations of what joining the EEC would have meant. It’s striking how people nowadays act as though various developments since then were not on the cards from day one.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

It’s genuinely bizarre to think that I lived right next door to this for five years and never knew about it.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Good stuff today, but disappointing news too. My desktop sidekicks are of course advising that I should just plod on, and I will. In a bit.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Just to show you: one distinct accent in Gilsland circled in the east and a very distinctly different one at Birdoswald circled in the west. Scarcely a mile and a half and rge shallow river Irthing between the two.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Folks, I’m about to watch a film about Sisyphus suing his boulder. It looks great. I hope others come to see it.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Verification in these matters is important, as I recently learned in England.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Inferior eclipse yesterday. I’d been hoping for a full-on seagull-shadow-on-sun effect, as depicted on Dublin’s streets.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Just six books in July, which continued the holiday fiction trend with a great introduction to Deighton followed by the peerless Jackson. The Iliad essays were timely and superb, Dirda on Doyle was fun, Cicero on friendship was excellent, and the Bangor book was odd but definitely worthwhile.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Was tempted earlier by the idea that I could see The Odyssey a third time, this time on the Superduperimaxscreen when visiting London, but it seems every showing is sold out to the end of time. In fairness, it’s very good, and improves with the rewatching.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

With Irish stuff, it’s not just that it’s old, going back to at least the sixth century, but that despite the various destructions by Vikings and English, there’s still so, so much of it. Only in recent years have people actually mapped out how much we have.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Ah: one follower, and him wanting Ireland to rejoin the UK. I guess that’s the author, with some help from artificial “intelligence”.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Nine books for June, including some regular fiction for a change. The Véliz book could be the most important book you’d read this year, while I can see why Daniel-Rops is regarded as a classic and the Maritain is something for anybody thinking of rebuilding a broken and corrupted world.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Shoddy journalism here: “whether the ball had touched an overhead cable” when it had visibly been *deflected* by the cable in a way that changed the direction of play. The article makes it sound as though it just grazed the wire, a mere technical issue.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Looking forward to going to see Nolan’s take on The Odyssey next week, though it’s awful when people depict characters from poems set in Mycenaean times in Archaic Greek outfits and armour. (Or when they don’t go for the “Helen spent the war in Egypt, with a mere phantom in Troy” option.)

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I’ll take “Things Dubliners would never say” for two hundred, please.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Syracuse proved an impressively theatrical place to visit. Can definitely recommend.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Just seven books in a less book-rich May than I’d hoped, though it was fun catching up with Saga which I’d been neglecting, and the other books were all worthwhile, with the one on the Cáin Adomnáin - which should be much better known - being particularly good.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Overall I tend to think that David Tracy had a good idea that Andrew Greeley explored in a specific Catholic v Protestant way, and then George Weigel and others almost propagandised it as a uniquely and universally Catholic thing.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

There are very good reasons why the Vatican is saying that the big tech companies “exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life” and that it would be appropriate for States and transnational bodies to regulate and police them for the good of all.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

It’s misleading for +Barron to say, for instance, that the Pope’s new encyclical places the moral legitimacy of private property and the free market alongside the universal destination of goods when it explicitly says they are subordinate to it and to the principle of solidarity.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I think “Roman Catholic” is pretty standard in England, fwiw. Here’s the sign you’ll see as you enter England’s Catholic mother-church, for example. There are some people here who tell Protestants off for using the term, but given this I think they’re just engaging in performative tantrums.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Some familiar spots on the flight this morning: the Menai Strait flying over Anglesey; Llandudno and Conwy; Brighton with the wonderful charred skeleton of West Pier just about visible; and finally Paris, where I’m currently waiting for my train. Meetings are on the cards.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

I fear the portions weren’t always sensibly sized, mind.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I’m finding this book deeply frustrating. It’s readable, and I’m learning a fair bit, but it makes bizarre claims about the natures of friendship in the past and even on its own terms it has vast gaps that undermine the landscape it’s trying to map.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Headline-writers at @irishtimes.com, the winner getting one-and-a-half times the points of the runner-up is not “pipping them at the post”. I mean, be fair.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Honestly, I don’t see what the Pope has against manuscripts. We have some cracking ones in Dublin. Printed books are clearly for rank modernists.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I’m doing well on the auld culinary multitasking nowadays. Lunches are proving especially productive on the reading front.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

You might be right, but there’s a school of thought - one I don’t buy - that American states basically are countries, and differ more than many countries do. That school may influence those who think America can’t be a nation in a meaningful sense.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Five books for April, with finishing the depressingly timely Hannah Arendt and the often timeless Chesterton collection taking most of the month. The Batman book contained some fabulously spooky detective stories, while Boyer was fun and Bratten Weiss was seriously thought-provoking.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Fun way to start my day - just a few weeks after the best royalty payment I’ve had in about a decade, I’ve finally used my author discount for the first time since I wrote my Cannae book half my life ago: www.amazon.co.uk/Cannae-Exper... Not a bad payoff for a master’s thesis!

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

In reality the Mother and Child Scheme mainly failed because doctors were opposed to it and because Browne - though a hero in some respects - was a bit of a bull in a china shop. Joe Lee is to the point on this. Unfortunately it’s become one of the great myth-topics of modern Irish history.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

As first days of summer go, that was a nice one. I enjoyed the company as I worked…

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Not, I should stress, that he thought the objective horrors of war nothing to worry about - on the contrary, he thought them monstrous, and worried for the souls of those who did not do likewise!

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Over some light lunchtime reading, I’m struck by how Augustine thought war’s objective horrors less important than participants’ spiritual state, and how it’s odd anybody would think an attack called “Operation Epic Fury” - “Massive Tantrum” being too on the nose - might in any sense be a just war.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Not a bad evening, that: a glorious sunset over the Boyne, and the finale for what I’d be pretty confident in describing as by some way the best adaptation of “The Count of Monte Cristo” I’ve ever seen.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Some exciting post today - the latest @plough.bsky.social and from @beehivebooks.bsky.social a really beautiful edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Wonder Book’ illustrated by the marvellous Das Pastoras.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

And yet in summarising yourself on your profile, Rhinelander doesn’t get a look in.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Folks, I think the word we want here is “Vansplaining”.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

I regret to inform you that it’s not looking good for the Cat in the Hat.

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Greg Daly @gregdaly.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

March was, I’m afraid, a pretty sparse month for reading - just two books completed, and me a chunk of the way through a third. Still: these were both worth the reading, with the Clark one being a fascinating study in stakeholder management in the context of NATO’s first sustained campaign.

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