Denis Healey once quipped of Shirley Williams that she needn’t think herself an intellectual just because she had a bad hairdo: Zhemchuzhina would have agreed. Unlike the dishevelled and independent-minded feminists of the Old Bolshevik milieu, by the mid-1930s women…

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, thousands of Christian converts and missionaries were executed, some of them crucified. In 1637-8, the government suppressed a rebellion of Catholic Samurai warriors and peasants with great brutality and drove the remaining…

Built in 1974, it was put up by Robert McAlpine, who relied on many of those “fusiliers” who had come to Birmingham from Ireland and who played such a key role in constructing the culture and identity of the modern…

It is important to distinguish the harms intrinsically connected to drug use from the many harms in addition to the creation of a lucrative criminal black market in drugs that are actually caused by prohibition. Prohibition-induced ignorance, confusion and rashness…

Highly promiscuous, he was unfaithful to all his women, and never – quite – managed to love anyone else as much as he loved himself. He was chauvinistic and seemed to have very little respect for women – Rebecca West…

A political response that would disengage from the demands of financial markets that are by definition volatile and oriented towards short-term profit is urgently needed from EU leaders. Their historical failure to react decisively, with clarity as well as vision,…

Gaps in personal biography are more than compensated for by O’Sullivan’s reassembly of the social and political networks inhabited by the O’Kelly brothers which, in their early years in Dublin and London, included John Devoy, James Clancy and Joe Clarke….

Although Mrs Thatcher professes to have found Mr Haughey easier to deal with than Dr FitzGerald, at the time … she had a high regard for his honesty of purpose and indeed (so it seemed to me) even a degree…

His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part,…

With so little available for the general reader on Irish literary culture between 600 and 1600, in either Irish or English, we have to wonder at the failure of most of the few dozen relevant academic Columbuses to report back…