Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Up Mount Improbable
Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality, by David Edmonds, Princeton University Press, The subtitle of David Edmonds’s biography of the English philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Surely a mission to save morality is something only a God-like being could take on. And since God…
First, the Struggle
Liam Lynch: To Declare a Republic, by Gerard Shannon, Merrion Press, 342 pp, €19.99, ISBN:978-1788558211 Liam Lynch was a key figure in the IRA between 1919 and 1921 and went on to become commander of the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War of 1922-23. He is perhaps most important for his central role in the…
White Mischief
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, by Caroline Elkins, Vintage, 896 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0099540250 Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire, by Erik Linstrum, Oxford University Press, 328 pp, £26.99, ISBN: 978-0197572030 Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain, by Stuart Ward,…
The Outsider
A Thread of Violence, by Mark O’Connell, Granta, 288 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-1783789573 They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. Philip Larkin, ‘This Be The Verse’ In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur murdered…
Sort of Neutral
Is Ireland Neutral? The Many Myths of Irish Neutrality, by Conor Gallagher, Gill Books, 336 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-0717195992 Conor Gallagher asks a simple question: is Ireland neutral? However, as he amply demonstrates in this lucid, readable and very timely book, this simple question does not have a simple answer. A scan of newspaper…
Eyes Wide Open
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, by Janet Malcolm, Granta, 155 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1783788361 Born Jana Wienerova in Prague in 1934, the elder of two girls, Janet Malcolm was just five when her family escaped from Nazism in July 1939. They had the additional good fortune to find sanctuary in the United States. As…
Live Differently
Nothing Special, by Nicole Flattery, Bloomsbury, 230 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-1526612120 ‘There was nothing special about our seed,’ says the eponymous narrator, Michael, to his pregnant lover in John McGahern’s 1979 novel The Pornographer, a line echoed, unintentionally or otherwise, in the title of Nicole Flattery’s bracingly provocative debut novel, Nothing Special. Though Flattery’s restrained…
The Chocolate Port
São Salvador da Bahia lies thirteen degrees south of the equator on the southernmost tip of a small triangular peninsula, which separates the Bay of All Saints from the Atlantic Ocean. It began as a fortress on a steep hill and became Brazil’s colonial capital, exporting dye woods, animal skins and gold to Portugal. The…
The Moment in the Rose-Garden
The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse, by Lyndall Gordon, Norton, 496 pp, 2023, $47, ISBN: 978-1324002802 British edition: Virago, 512 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0349012117 From its very first sentence, this book gives a jolt to Eliot studies. The poet is a master of disguise, writes Lyndall Gordon, who has proven herself more than capable…
Hounding Oscar
Oscar Wilde on Trial: The Criminal Proceedings from Arrest to Imprisonment, by Joseph Bristow, Yale University Press, 672 pp, £65, ISBN: 978-0300222722 This is certainly not the first book to be devoted to the trials of Oscar Wilde. As early as 1912 there was Christopher Sclater Millard’s Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried. The word has…
Football Crazy
Soccer and Society in Dublin: A History of Association Football in Ireland’s Capital, by Conor Curran, Four Courts Press, 352 pp, €35, ISBN: 978-180151-0394 When I was a half-Irish boy growing up in London in the 1950s and 1960s, I was football-mad. And the thing that distinguished me from my soccer-obsessed school and club…
The Lure of Nostalgia
The Return of the State by Graeme Garrard, Yale University Press, 227 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0300256758 We are almost entirely dependent on the state for our security and wellbeing. And yet it often seems to be an uncherished institution. If the Irish state is in any way representative, it has had a bad press in…