[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWz0JC7afNQ[/embedyt] The origin of the luminous phrase ‘killing moon’ is obscure (at least it is to me). Google throws up no reference other than the 1984 Echo and the Bunnymen tune, and a 1994 video game called Under a Killing Moon, ‘the largest of its era’ according to Wikipedia.

This is the edited text of a talk given by Alex Niven at the NewBridge Project, Newcastle-upon-Tyne last week. I’d like to start with a quotation from Dubliners, James Joyce’s first work of fiction, published almost exactly a hundred years ago. It was written largely in the Edwardian period, in