Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Outlasting Fashion
The notions of rule and order that Richard Murphy inherited from his colonial administrator father have been put to different use by him in fashioning a body of poetic work that will endure.
Imagining the Others
An accessible crime thriller it may be, but John Banville’s most celebrated novel also marks out his singular intellectual ambition, an ambition that in the early 1970s Seamus Deane recognised as distinguishing him from all other young Irish writers.
The Road to Genocide
The ancient Christian communities of Syria, having survived the rise of Islam in the seventh century and the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth may be driven into the sea in the twenty-first.
Rebroadcast Voices
A new collection of translations from Derek Mahon defends the notion of a republic of letters, where writers do not write in the isolation of their own language but in a conversation that goes beyond temporal and geographical borders, as…
Dying for Dixie
A new study examines the case of the Irish immigrants who found themselves in the southern states at the time of the American Civil War and who circumstances dictated would declare for the Confederacy.
Do the right thing
The debate over ethics and the role it might or might not play in economic life sparked by recent comments from President Higgins could be informed by a study of the Irish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson, who posited an objective…
In Other Men’s Homes
For all the mystique and mystification, imperialism, as Orwell recognised, is essentially a money-making racket, while the kernel of racism resides in the pretence that the exploited are not real human beings.
Down Under
Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly is Irish not in a straightforward or obvious way but is rather a metonymy for the citizen-outlier, the alternative history, the exemplary failure, the heroic victim, the road that is not just not travelled but is…
No Partition, No Planning, No Poverty
Some old familiars are to be encountered in a historical geography of Donegal, but it is more surprising what is not encountered.
There will be blood
More than any other single figure, Maximilien Robespierre is identified with, and blamed for, the terror and bloodshed of France’s revolutionary years, yet the hostility of contemporaries, historians and political commentators is not wholly justified.
Iran and Realpolitik
In the West people generally think of the Islamic world as very ideological, and indeed it is, but the world is complex and realpolitik plays a dominant role in the Muslim sphere just as it does everywhere else.
Riverrun
A stroll along Dublin’s river Liffey, from Heuston Station, past Eve and Adam’s and out to the bend of the bay, reveals the city’s seventeen and a half bridges and the stories behind them.