Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The God in the I
The Estonian aristocrat Hermann Keyserling was recognised as a leading intellectual in Europe and America in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1911, aged thirty-one, he travelled around the world to develop his spirituality. The Travel Diary of…
The Swiss Laid Bare
An impressive study by an Irish-born journalist who is a long-time resident in the confederation moves beyond lazy cliche and prejudice, driven by a desire to get the facts about the country straight, and for those facts to be fair…
Magical Migrations
Short but packed with ideas, Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel shares with his previous work a compelling engagement with the present political moment. In its unambiguous faith in pluralism and tolerance, it is also a surprisingly optimistic message from a possible…
Customised Care
What is known as precision medicine (PM) proposes the customisation of healthcare, with medical decisions, practices, and/or products tailored to an individual patient’s disease, in a process in which the “collateral damage” which sometimes ensues from treatment should be minimised.
A Canine Resurrection
The ancient Irish Wolfhound was chosen as an emblem for the Abbey Theatre and a mascot for the Irish Volunteers. But in fact the dog we know as the Wolfhound is far from ancient and far from ‘pure’. And perhaps,…
Language in Orbit
The governing thread in a new selected Muldoon is a life lived from his upbringing in the village of Moy on the Tyrone-Armagh border to Princeton. The work engages concerns both private and public, while Muldoon’s poems address an increasingly…
Hidden Persuaders
We can have democracy or we can have great concentrations of wealth, but not both, ‘people’s attorney’ Louis Brandeis warned. A new study shows the extent to which the super-rich were prepared to go to block Obama’s ambition to foster…
They’re Selling Postcards of the Stoning
When Bob Dylan blasted out his electric version of “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he was, for many, committing sacrilege. Pete Seeger, who at the time epitomised American folk music tradition, was said to have called…
Is cuimhin liom
The highlight of the state’s celebration of 1916 came on Easter Sunday, when it was established beyond doubt that the title Óglaigh na hÉireann belongs to the body that led the march past the GPO and not to bogus armies…
The Note for Grief
Each year Dermot Healy built a stone wall on the beach near his home, only for it to be washed away by the sea. Loss, his poems seem to say, is an intrinsic aspect of our world, and inseparable from…
Look, It’s Simple
At an early stage of a new popularising book on quantum physics a crucial paradox is introduced: that ‘the more we discover, the more we understand that what we don’t know is greater than what we know’.
Mishearing Voices
Artists are free to take liberties and twist facts in presenting a fictional account of the lives of actual people, but the dialogue in a novel based on James, Nora, Lucia and Giorgio Joyce does not sound very much like…