Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Inside Man
An unorthodox, non-doctrinaire leftist, Gore Vidal tended to make would-be political allies uncomfortable and was not an easy individual with whom to make common cause.
NAUGHTY BUT NICE
Jane Austen inherited a tradition in which the novel was expected to teach good behaviour. But that was not what interested her. Her fictions are less moral examples than celebrations of wit and intelligence.
ADDLED BY BOOKS
Enrique Vila-Matas plays some complex games with literature and characters yet any threat of heaviness is redeemed by his assured comic touch and fine sense of the ridiculous.
SYRIA’S UPRISING
Concord between various ethnic groups in Syria appeared evident until acts of obscene violence began to be carried out by both the regime and anti-regime forces. But few people in the future will want to live alongside those they suspect…
INSURRECTIONISTS AND SKIRMISHERS
When you lose in politics there is a tendency for others ‑ particularly the young ‑ to question, if not denounce, your tactics. Notwithstanding the impressive list of achievements and concessions won by O’Connell over thirty-odd years, his ending was…
REPLY TO JOHN BORGONOVO
The author responds to a review of his book on the Black and Tans.
THE MAGIC’S GONE
JK Rowling’s new adult novel has more characters than are good for it. It’s also a little difficult to care too much about them.
REPLY TO JOHN REGAN
Response to John Regan’s review of Eve Morrison’s “Kilmichael revisited: Tom Barry and the ‘false surrender”’ in D Fitzpatrick, Terror in Ireland: 1916-1923.
DUBLIN AT WAR
There has been no collective amnesia in Ireland about the Great War. The event was remembered in Dublin for many decades after it ended, but in terms appropriate to the city’s experience of it.
LETTER FROM PHILADELPHIA
The Republicans are an alliance of the super-rich and degree-less whites, topped with an upper crust of hypercapitalists, a misalliance cemented by pan-Protestant evangelism.
THINKING SHORT
A fixation on short term gain led to our economic collapse. Now it’s time to focus on the real economy, where the fundamentals are still sound.
THE HOUSE OF CARDS
László Krasznahorkai’s novels are balanced between a precarious inertia and total collapse. The animating tension of his work resides not, as is the case in more conventional novels, in questions of who did what or what happens next, but in…