Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Misery and Improvement
The European Enlightenment made its mark in Ireland as well as elsewhere. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century there was optimism about improvement and progress, while at the same time poor harvests, famine and disease took off between…
Real Americans
Liberals in the US have been told they must understand the grievances of Trump voters. Yet it is difficult to conclude that many of them are anything other than the political enemies of social solidarity, who believe that only ‘winners’…
Changing Direction
Economic stagnation in the Ireland of the 1950s persuaded many that a different economic course must be tried out. The name of TK Whitaker is intimately associated with the new departure, but the changes that occurred did not exactly match…
Time to Listen
Mental function is immensely complicated and our understanding of it still in its relative infancy; in Ireland our first psychiatric institutions date back only to the early eighteenth century. Could it be that it is the human brain or mind,…
Private Places
A study of the idea of domestic space in Northern Irish poetry offers fresh perspectives on poems long in the public eye, finding new meaning in key works by Heaney, Longley, Mahon and McGuckian. One of its great virtues is…
The Past Remains
Visitors to Ukrainian Lviv, once Polish Lwów, once Austro-Hungarian Lemberg, will find that while cultures and peoples and languages can be overwritten by others, often violently, they may reappear years later, to stand as evidence to the fact that complete…
The Truth and Colonel McGrath
By the closing stages of World War Two, the Germans had assembled a substantial number of hostages, ranging from Allied army intelligence officers to rebels against Nazism, to politicians from defeated countries or former allies. Among them was an Irishman…
A Necessary Restitution
The English poets of the 1940s, sandwiched between Auden, Spender, MacNeice and the main poets of the 1930s and the later development of ‘the Movement’, tend to be overlooked today. The publication of a collected poems of one important figure,…
Storied Women
A companion volume to Sinéad Gleeson’s ‘The Long Gaze Back’ charts the unique tradition of short fiction by women from the North of Ireland. Gleeson traces its historical arc from the turn of the century to the present and includes…
A Postmodern Disease
Up to 1 per cent of the population may have coeliac disease but many more have self-diagnosed themselves as gluten-sensitive. Is gluten sensitivity based on any scientific evidence or is it the product of a misalliance between academic medicine and…
The New Souperism
Irish parents are often forced to have their children participate in a form of religious observance in which they themselves do not believe in exchange for educational and social benefits. We once called this souperism. And the current shabby compromise…
The Backward Look
The Russians, according to Svetlana Alexievich, are a people of misfortune and suffering whose best moments have come with war. Following the failed experiment to drive an entire nation ‘with an iron hand to happiness’, the people no longer have…