They were popular and fiery field-preachers, but they had also retained an equally fiery anti-popery. Their millenarian tendencies and interpretation of the French Revolution as prefacing the downfall of the Antichrist finds rather strange echoes in Tone’s apparently rational writings….

He was involved in the Gothic revival in, for example, stained glass. In textiles, he was both a weaver and a dyer –both the technical and the aesthetic aspects of his work are of interest. He was a businessman and…

Like his Oxford tutor Jowett’s, the real Hopkins’s sexual impulses were almost exclusively concerned with his own sex. His mid-1860s adolescent list of sins, recorded for confessional purposes to Canon Liddon and Dr Pusey, his High Church Oxford mentors, with…

The transferability of postmodern discourse, and its endless repetition over recent decades in academic essays, papers, dissertations, articles, talks and books, throws its usefulness into question in a way not intended by its adherents; it may also induce in the…

My work meant that I travelled fairly frequently with Garret and Joan and he would often extend an invitation to dinner. These affairs were always convivial but also intellectually stimulating occasions. In private I found him to be extraordinarily humble…

Italians are famous for their campanilismo, a word which literally means “attachment to one’s own bell tower”, and is a lyrical way of describing provincialism or localism in a nation with hundreds of medieval towns and cities, each with its…

When democracy arrived in full force in Paris in 1848, Tocqueville led the assault on its pretensions. No universal tendency was going to have its way there. It could go tend elsewhere. A good war would stop it; bring the…

Yes, there has been a paucity of bold political leadership in Europe. However, in the almost four years since the onset of the international credit crunch, Ireland has managed only a number of baby-steps in the area of overdue structural…

In 1916 Revd JW Tristram summed up his early thoughts in the Church of Ireland’s Irish Church Quarterly in opposition to “The late Rebellion”: “When Irish people learn to rise early, tell the truth, use soap and water more freely,…

From the novel of manners to the crime novel of bad manners

Murphy shows little interest in or awareness of previous studies of the social context of the revolution, accepts the reality of the probably imaginary “Cairo Gang”, and utterly misrepresents the level of confidence of IRA leaders at the time of…