Burning Heresies A Memoir of a Life in Conflict, 1979-2020

In this remarkable sequel to his critically acclaimed memoir Watching the Door, Irish journalist Kevin Myers reflects on his roller-coaster career over three decades in the Irish media, from the European conflicts he reported from to the personal conflicts he fought. Fresh from the horrors of 1970s Belfast, Myers took a job in 1979 with The Irish Times, and brilliantly evokes the comical chaos of life in the smoky newsroom of Ireland’s paper-of-record. Having taken over An Irishman’s Diary, Myers single-handedly pioneered the campaign to rehabilitate the memory of the forgotten Irish soldiers of the Great War, and in the process fell foul of the paper’s editor, the legendary Douglas Gageby. His reward were plane tickets to more perilous assignments as Myers was back in the frontline of European warzones, as communism collapsed and civil wars emerged. While Myers’s is at his brilliant best dodging bullets on the battlefields of Tel Aviv, Beirut and Sarajevo, he also keenly and unapologetically participates in the many cultural conflicts erupting within a rapidly changing Ireland, as he opines on a broad spectrum of Irish life, covering history, politics, religion, economics, culture and society; all explored in his inimitable prose and sardonic wit. This courageously trenchant account of journalistic conflict and hubris also forensically examines his very public fall from grace in 2017, and his legal battle with RTÉ for a public apology. Burning Heresies is a candid and eye-opening must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in Irish life and current affairs.

Journalist, broadcaster and novelist Kevin Myers wrote for The Irish Times, The Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Irish Independent and The Sunday Times in a career that spanned over thirty years. He reported from Africa, Central America, India and Japan, covered the wars in Lebanon and Bosnia, and was journalist of the year for his dispatches from Beirut. His first memoir, Watching the Door: A Memoir, 1971–1978, was published in 2006. In 2017, he was sacked from the Irish edition of The Sunday Times for allegedly anti-Semitic observations.