A good poem renews the language in restoring its truthfulness, its honesty of expression, avoiding the false and honeyed words of the courtier and the exploitation of the advertiser or lobbyist. It restores it further in re-exposing its beauty in…

Mulligan’s insinuations link up with one of the novel’s main themes, the convergence of Bloom and Stephen, when he tells the company how he saw “the sheeny” at the entrance to the library eyeing the backside of a nude female…

If Brian Moore’s work seemed “outsiderish” to the young Heaney in 1962, what must he have made of Hutchinson? He had been “outside” Ireland for well over a decade at this point, learning the languages of greater Europe – Catalan,…

More recently, pundits close to the Kremlin have intoned about “memory wars”, mainly in reaction to the critical views of Stalinist history advanced by Ukraine and the Baltic states in what is seen in Moscow as an attempt to denigrate…

Not so fortunate was his great rival, the correspondent (and now editor) of the New York Times, Bill Keller, who left Moscow a few months before the end and, having received a large advance to write the definitive account of…

Whigs like William Monsell were blackguarded by nationalists as corrupt place-seekers and toadies and Whig became a dirty word in the Irish lexicon – one thinks, not without a feeling of irony, of Francis Cruise O’Brien, father of Conor, berating…

Sean MacStiofáin, whose Irish ethnicity was according to Harte “based on a lone great-grandparent”, became a prominent leader of the IRA in the 1960s and early 1970s. Cathal Goulding, once a brother-in-arms and later an opponent, said of him that…

At this point in his review, Eliot moves toward thinking that to make sense of Yeats you have first to remember that he is an Irishman. To be an Irishman, he thinks, is to be deprived of certain attributes of…

Both irrationalism and rationalism have fallen out of favour as modes of scientific knowledge – though rationalism has resurfaced as qualitative research, and the debates about the scientific status of qualitative research are lively reminders about the uncertainty within science…

European literature has a long history of casting Africa as a disturbing enigma; the image of “the dark continent” lingered long beyond its time. But while Not Untrue and Not Unkind is yet another European novel with an enigma at…

Salandra instructed Italy’s regional governors to prepare reports for him on people’s attitudes to the coming conflict. The findings were that most people thought going to war could be justified only if the homeland was under attack. Business leaders, with…