Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Licking Death
Cancer is a serious business, and also big business, particularly in the US. But ‘declaring war’ on it is like declaring war on death. Our own Irish Cancer Society has launched a ‘strategy statement’ that envisages a ‘future without cancer’,…
The Joke’s the Thing
Joseph Heller’s great novel is indeed a satire, not just on war but on McCarthyism and bureaucracy. But above all it is absurd –a sugar-coated pill to cope with the joke of war and the joke of life and a…
The Work of Giants
The architectural profession, peacock-like, has sprung to the fore in modern Ireland. But in Victorian Ireland the heroes were the engineers, and justifiably so.
What’s funny?
There have been many attempts to define the essence of humour but it seems to be a little too complex and wide-ranging to be captured by any single theory.
Where we are
We are, somewhat unsurprisingly, where we are. But how did we get there? And does our constitution have anything to do with it? It can be argued that the 1937 assemblage of principles has served us well. But who exactly…
Evil Literature
A new survey deals with literature and sexuality in Ireland from Joyce to McGahern, taking in the background of shrill clerical warnings of moral dangers and occasions of sin and a more humane and well-intentioned, if much mocked, strain of…
Beyond Belief
Gabriel García Márquez emerged explosively as a new international name in the 1960s with a novel stuffed with the baroque and the fantastic, which sought to translate the scope of America.
Neighbours
Germany and Russia have had a relationship over the centuries that has more often been businesslike than hostile. The business being conducted, however, and the deals that have been struck, have seldom much benefited the countries in between.
Keeping It Together
Belgium was saved from disintegration in the immediate postwar period by the pragmatism and farsightedness of its centrist political parties and their leaders. Do its politicians still retain those qualities?
A Single Volume Bound by Love
Clive James’s new Dante is the highly effective work of a poet who has absorbed tradition, who is aware of the demands of form, whose translations are imaginative and whose scholarship is immaculate.
Selective Memories
In the business of commemoration tensions are to be expected between the practices of the academy, the demands of the state and the expectations of individuals and groups on how each and every significant date is marked, or not marked.
The Lion and the Haunted House
Derryman Alec Foster was a great rugby player, a noted traditional singer and a highly regarded teacher, a left-wing republican and a founding member of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. He was also connected to a troublesome ghost.