Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Risen People
The 1916 Rising can summon up more unanimity of feeling in the nation than many other events that occurred a few years before or after. Nevertheless, whatever our sympathy for the participants, we should be wary of considering it a…
Down the Rabbit Hole
A Russian-Irish writer in the tradition of Bulgakov
From War To War
The celebrated German historian Heinrich August Winkler argues that it was not only the First World War but also the global economic depression after 1929 that were the twin events leading to so much catastrophe and destruction in European history…
Earth’s Old Bones
John Keats championed the truth of imagination, while the naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt was the first to see nature as a unified organism. Moya Cannon invites both to tea. It’s an edgy business. She serves them in separate rooms and…
A Necessary Correction
Arthur Griffith: the most misunderstood major figure in modern Irish history
Post-Punk Polymath
It is no surprise that such an outstanding lyricist as Elvis Costello should be able to deliver such an engaging autobiography. And for a man who used to punch out an album with a free EP, plus a brace of…
Saved by Rock ’n’ Roll
In the 1950s, when Susan Sontag was a young woman, high culture, middlebrow culture and pop culture existed in hermetically sealed spheres. In her writings on pop and as a pioneer of film studies in the English language cultural sphere,…
Bad Blood
The ‘blood libel’, the notion that Jews were kidnapping and murdering Christian children for ritual purposes, was not created by poor and ignorant people but rather by rich and powerful ones, who found the persecution and murder of Jews sometimes…
Philosophy in UCD
What kind of place was Dublin’s main university for Catholic students at a time when Ireland was just beginning to be affected by the youth and other revolutions and when the Catholic Church was at the very beginning of a…
The Vault of Feeling
Kevin Stevens’s assured new novel explores the difficulties faced by a young immigrant of Arab and Muslim background in small-town America, difficulties which include racism and the weight of overbearing tradition, but which can be countered by friendship, love and…
Home From Cyberia
In a world in which we are offered so much instant gratification by technology, in which we have become hooked to it to an unprecedented degree, the self is not augmented but depleted. And we are so distracted that we…
If You Liked This …
The eminent Milanese writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, chairman of Adelphi Edizioni, has an unusual recipe for commercial success: publish only books that you think are of the highest quality, and become known for publishing only books of the highest…