Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Governing in Hard Times
Ireland’s first independent government was faced with the ruinous cost of the Civil War, low levels of educational attainment and a tax base heavily eroded by emigration. While they could perhaps have done more to develop the economy, they succeeded…
Slim Pickings for the Soft Left
France has long been a beacon for social democrats but we may be looking at the beginning of the fall of social France. The political elites of right and left increasingly conform to Peter Mair’s idea of the cartel party,…
Cold War Reinvented
It is more than a little depressing to contemplate the possibility that the old cold war narrative which restricted the potential of so many individuals and peoples over the latter half of the twentieth century has given way to a…
The Lost Chief
The decision to abandon Parnell in the belief that sacrificing him would secure home rule lost Ireland a great leader and left in his place a myth of the tragic and romantic hero. Those who had made the decision overestimated…
Back in the GDR
Elizabeth Shaw, born in Belfast in 1920 to a bank manager father from Sligo, became a celebrated children’s author and book illustrator in postwar East Germany and a member of the state’s cultural elite. A primary school is named after…
From Salonika to Soloheadbeg
We may disagree over how best to commemorate the First World War, but we should recognise that it fundamentally changed Ireland, creating the conditions that made possible the revolutionary events of 1916 to 1923.
Captain Mighthavebeen
The mid-1960s saw a relaxation of old certainties among both communities in Northern Ireland. The unionist leader Terence O’Neill was conscious that it was necessary to offer some remedy to the discrimination that Catholics suffered, but even his mild measures…
THE BIG ONE
Though he fell out with the temper of the times in the later 1960s, in the light of history Bellow will be a judged a great American novelist, and Herzog, cerebral and earthy, imbued with two thousand years of learning…
The Goggle Box
Television has been accused of dumbing down the population almost since it was invented. For TS Eliot even the word itself was ugly and foreign. Noel Coward thought it ‘hideous and horrid’, while those on the left feared it would…
Hope in Guatemala
The overthrow of Árbenz in 1954 was among the most ill-conceived CIA operations. In the hypercharged atmosphere of the early cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower, secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, decided that…
John Bull Knows Best
A new biography of British liberal imperialist Thomas Macaulay, who made his mark on India as a young man, does not challenge the view that the liberalism he espoused was often only skin deep while the imperialism was all too…
The Light from the East
A new book demonstrates the longlasting and deep engagment of various Irish scholars and practitioners with the religious and cultural traditions of eastern Asia.