Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
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…
Empress of Asunción
In March 1870 Solano López was finally hunted down in the Paraguayan wilderness of Cerro Corá and killed by a Brazilian soldier. Panchito died with him and Lynch buried them both with her bare hands before being escorted first to…
A Discontinued People
The Saxon churches no longer have parishioners and there is not a whisper of German to be heard in the schools, since their pupils and teachers vanished altogether twenty years ago. The prolonged death agony of this community, which started…
Science and Nation
“Every jelly mass quivered – shook – moved. A moment more and the reaction had gone to a finish. Denis M’Carthy, Dublin Metropolitan Policeman, true Celt, minor poet, rose to his feet a Chemist.” The message of the parable seems…
They Took The Blows
Ahern’s patience, likeability and almost congenital desire to avoid confrontation helped him. He effectively handed over control of domestic policy to Charlie McCreevy and the PDs. His failure to get agreement on his most favoured policy, the building of a…
Fugitive Pleasures
These then are the lives Hastings tackles – those of playwright, short story virtuoso and novelist, traveller, millionaire art collector, exile, homosexual, secret agent and unhinged old man. Maugham had a long life – he published his first books while…
New Irelands
French Catholic culture offered a supplementary world, and in some cases a focus for unfulfilled longings, for those who found Free State culture insufficient or repetitive. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross can strike today’s reader as brilliantly eccentric, an anomaly;…
Out of the Ice
In most communist societies, the intelligentsia, and in particular the artistic intelligentsia – engineers of the human soul in Stalin’s phrase – were afforded the opportunity to feel important and live well, if at the price of a slight (in…
Increments of Uncertainty
As Updike’s word count mounted, so did the rancour. The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, considered by many the most powerful literary critic in America, regularly savaged his work. Over the last decade she accused successive novels of being “bogus…