Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Opening Up
To many readers, the attraction lies in this firm refusal of mystery about the act itself (though to Philip Larkin, the prospect of visiting universities to explain how a poem was written was “like going round explaining how you sleep…
The Melancholy Gods
Hermes records in his narrative the complicated relations of the Godley family, as they wait for the patriarch, Adam, to die. Once a celebrated mathematician, he is a sombre, philosophising intellectual who has never come to terms with the mundanity…
Into The Mainstream
According to ethnic fade theory, with the days of “No Irish Need Apply” having been, as it were, officially declared over, there was no longer any need for “Irish” as a social or civic marker any more. Ethnicity became a…
Synge’s Violin
In requiring “regular metrical pulses” of “folk” music White is surely smarting from an overexposure to the regular grumbling of the bodhran, which indeed the great and grumbling uilleann player Seamus Ennis suggested was best played with a knife. Ennis’s…
How Firm A Foundation?
Milch is offering a dramatic version of the phenomenon assessed in Mark S Schantz’s study of how evangelical Protestantism saturated nineteenth century American life and created a powerful culture of death, which actually provoked and sustained the war. A vision…
The Melting Centre
The electoral decline of the large parties has been accompanied by a massive fall in party membership. Since the early 1990s the SPD has lost over 400,000 members and the CDU nearly 300,000. They have also become less attractive to…
A New Life
Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House has lived a lie in order to fulfil the ideal of the perfect marriage. Mrs Alving in Ghosts has played a long-drawn-out game of humouring her husband’s debauchery while being in love with someone…
Good Old Queens
Indeed, what we have in Lubiewo is a panorama of Poland in years of great turmoil without the stock heroic underground opposition and the stock brutal militia officer. Witkowski’s characters are unheroic, unengaged, unpolitical. For Lukrecja and Patrycja the barracks…
A Revolutionary Janus
In a sense, most of the old guard never fully understood, and certainly never accepted the consequences of, the process they had initiated. If they had, they would have released control of the Workers Party with good grace to De…
Against the Demon
As settlers and administrators spread into the region, the world ended for countless indigenous communities in unreported acts of violence. Vast slave kingdoms were established. The legendary Colonel Fawcett remembered: “The atrocities on the Putumayo in Peru, disclosed by Sir…
Time Bends in the Sun
Future breakthroughs may reveal that Einstein and his theories of relativity are not entirely correct and like Newton’s theories merely an approximation of nature. To quote Newton again: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but…
The Need to Disguise
Central to Alice Munroe’s aesthetic is the device, though it is really much more than a device, of jumping back and forward in time, enabling readers to hold multiple strands of the narrative in their consciousness, creating cross-sections of event…