Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Commemoration Trap
All political parties cannibalise the past selectively for facts and arguments deemed useful to safeguarding and advancing their future fortunes. This is normal and to be expected. But what is produced in this way is not history, which is a…
The Big World Spins
Ireland in the revolutionary and Civil War years seemed to be much taken up with its own affairs. But Dubliners flocked to a lavish new picture palace, attended a world title fight and, in spite of warnings of the moral…
England Unfree
A novel written entirely in an archaic version of English and without the benefit of punctuation evokes the world of the Saxons overwhelmed by the sudden and brutal invasion of the Normans in the late eleventh century. It has been…
What Next?
Justin Quinn is fascinated by the inevitability that rhyme suggests: as one rhyme brings on another, so we are born, produce other lives, and die. Generation follows generation in a process that has fascinated Quinn since he wrote of the…
Airborne
‘The Airship Era’ one of O’Reilly’s most finely achieved poems, explores the moment in which modern technology meets the legacy of symbolic traditional cultures. In the figure of the Zeppelin the future is untethered from the earth as air and…
After The Glory
Irishmen who served with the British army in the First World War are now almost routinely portrayed as forgotten victims, a marginalised group living in a condition of semi-boycott. A thorough analysis of their conditions of life in succeeding decades…
Boza Calling
Orhan Pamuk is a writer whose life and work are held aloft as emblematic of his country’s wishes and woes. In his new novel, Pamuk suggests that tradition in the public sphere need not be dangerous
Terror Without Mercy
Huge numbers of people died in the Nazi concentration camps but they were not where the majority of Jews perished. Rather they were an instrument of the regime’s desire for total repression and control which changed and adapted to suit…
A Cooling Cinder
A fictional portrait of Dublin in the years leading up to the Great War and 1916 is brimming with ideas and has a great deal of historical interest, even if its author’s ill-digested anger at his enemies and overschematic approach…
Wee Book, Big Muscles
Don Paterson should be recognised as a poet who offers us strenuousness and sweetness in a way that nobody has since John Donne; he kills his enemies and loves his friends, making us vibrantly aware of poetry’s capabilities as an…
Daddy’s Pal
A memoir can be an expansive story in which, regrettably, nothing is left out and which one would really prefer not to have to listen to. Or it can be a careful literary construction where much raw material has clearly…
Getting the Left on Track
A new book that argues that the way forward for social democracy is more state, more tax, more spending fails to convince. If these were recipes likely to be favoured by the electorate there would be social democratic governments thriving…