Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
A Tiny Space of Little Importance
As most of Ireland seethes at the individuals who prospered while the country pitched over into a financial sump, Justin Quinn has composed a novel that not only asks us to sympathise with one of those wealthy figures but actually…
The Red and the Green
Ireland long had two parties competing for the favour of the Soviet Union. One was to remain tiny and irrelevant; the other found that its strategy of formulating ‘reformist demands in the mouth of a revolutionary party’ was not sustainable…
Beastly to the Hun
A new study of the origins of the First World War provides an engaging and skilful account but is perhaps a little too close to the perceptions of the victors and a little too ready to see only malice emanating…
Endgame
It is proper to retain some scepticism about the prevailing heroic narrative of the War of Independence, which was not without its unattractive features, but to claim that an armed campaign was unnecessary is to make an assertion for which…
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…