Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Three Presences
Yeats, Eliot and Pound were the three dominant figures in the remaking of early twentieth century English poetry. Though they managed to maintain friendships, each of them was, to a significant degree, deaf to rhythms other than their own.
A Famine Document
In April 1847 a vessel departed from Charlestown naval yard with eight hundred tons of relief supplies for the people of the city and county of Cork, paid for by the people of Boston and other towns in Massachusetts.
The Inishowen Oracle
John Toland, born into Gaelic-speaking north Donegal in the late seventeenth century, became an important controversialist, deist, pantheist and passionate anti-cleric.
Keepable Sentences
An interview with American novelist Kent Haruf, whose stories of the high plains of Colorado, with their plain but perfectly crafted style and exacting verisimilitude, achieve a mythic dimension rare in contemporary fiction
HIDING IRELAND
A new history of the English-approved aristocracy of Ireland in the seventeenth century shows remarkable command of official sources but reads as if the other Ireland, that is the vast majority, scarcely existed.
Casement’s War
Roger Casement’s sojourn in Germany is hugely significant for Ireland and England, and especially apposite now the 1914-16 centenary years are approaching.
History is to Blame
Samuel Pepys, an insider whom the Glorious Revolution made an outsider, was a brilliant administrator, a great observer and a fine writer, a humane and tolerant man and a great lover of women.
Catholic Truth
The teaching of science was often a difficult matter in Irish Catholic educational institutions and respected thinkers could sometimes be met by flawed, incoherent and ignorant polemic.
Neither Here Nor There
Sherman Alexie writes of the lives of Washington state’s native Americans, who frequently do not feel quite at home either in Seattle or in the Indian reservations where many of them have roots.
Gender, Politics, Solidarity
Judith Butler and Sarah Schulman have each made significant contributions not just to gender studies and political action but to Jewish activist solidarity with the Palestinians.
Half the Picture
Historians who cannot engage with Irish-language sources risk fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the public sphere, which in Ireland was long associated with orality and manuscript rather than print culture.
To the Manor Born
Big Houses may mean culture and civility, but they are also at the nub of a whole system of property, labour and production and engage the hard-headed qualities of the gentry as well as its more high-minded impulses.