Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Empathy Man
Finishing a novel for Colum McCann feels like finishing a PhD. He upends the traditional maxim to “write what you know” in favour of writing “what you want to know”.
The Meaning of Ryanair
Orwell got it wrong. It is not governments but banks, insurance companies, pension funds and low-cost airlines, the raucous cheerleaders of deregulation, that oppress and stupefy us with a network of small and baffling rules.
The Gentleman Naturalist
Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution have weathered well and he cannot be held responsible for those who have developed a repugnant politics on the back of a vulgarisation of them.
Casement Wars
Roger Casement dared to dream and turned out to be a nation-builder, regardless of the foolish attempts of his more enthusiastic supporters to deny the reality of his sexual nature. If that was accepted, his stature would rise.
The Hunger Angel
Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller looked with the eyes of the victim on the political masters of terror and called it by its name.
Patrick Pearse Predicts the Future
Writing in 1906, the man who would later be one of the leaders of the Easter Rising envisaged a future one hundred years hence in which Ireland would have made enormous strides and English would be taught in schools only…
One Book, Two Cities
James Plunkett’s classic novel reminds us of a society in which the poorest lived in the most appalling and hopeless conditions and the middle and upper classes were barely conscious of their existence.
Good Time Girls
The Profumo Affair helped defeat a government and usher England into the Swinging Sixties. But the villains of the piece were not the politicians or the young women whose names became famous but the sleazy and prurient popular press.
Hopkins’s Wound
Gerard Manley Hopkins was careless of the fate of his poems, treated his muse like a slut and her children as an unwanted and vaguely sinful burden.
A Millionaire of Words
Joyce’s funny, moving and infuriating masterpiece should send us, not into the cold and sterile embrace of the examination room, but out again into the warm and throbbing world.
And Another Thing
The most recent translation of WG Sebald’s work offers the expected pleasure of his engaging prose style and an introduction to the world of some intriguing German writers.
A Tearless People
The year is 1937 and the place Moscow, one of the key settings in European history and a fault line in the history of civilisation.