Social partnership has been the only real government achievement of recent times and even this can be read – particularly under Ahern – as an expression of the pervasive electorally-oriented politics of emollience. In general, Irish politicians have declined the…

Chief among them is Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), a book – length sequence which can be read as an autobiographical account of a breakdown and as a response to the chaotic and destructive emergence of the new state.These poems’…

Like Swift and Twain, Roth is aesthetically propelled by anger; it supplies the energy needed for the massive, self-imposed task of dissecting, novel after novel, the suffocating paradoxes of twentieth-century America. Like Lenny Bruce, Roth in his early work used…

McMahon makes an incontestable case that London’s profound lack of understanding of de Valera’s methods, agenda and electoral prospects was itself partly the result of a failure to produce a dispassionate examination of all evidence – most of it in…

Good, old-fashioned speculation on rising asset values did for the Irish banks. Quite traditional regulatory tools should have been sufficient to prevent them getting into deep trouble if they had been vigorously and rigorously used. But they were not. The…

For Yeats, O’Connell was “the Great Comedian”, the crowd-pleasing rhetorician staging a theatre of political melodrama, more concerned with provoking an immediate popular response than with personal integrity or long-term consequences, wholeheartedly professing Catholic piety in public while seducing housemaids…

Strabo still found time to enjoy the wine on Samos – an experience shared almost two thousand years later by Byron. But his observation that the wine from the Ephesus region “has been found to cause headache” seems in some…

It is to literature we have to look to convey an experience for which there are no direct words, notably to its resources within tone and connotation. Heidegger, in the end, saw in poetry a better means than philosophy to…

Although Dutch was the majority language in the north of the Belgian state established in 1830-31, it was dominated by French-speaking elites. This was so even in Dutch-speaking regions. There had been some French influence there, in the west in…

In “Dello scrivere oscuro” (On Obscure Writing), an essay written for the Turin newspaper La Stampa in 1976 and reprinted in the collection Other People’s Trades, Primo Levi wrote: “One should never impose limits or rules on creative writing.” And…

The resourceful street-hawkers of Manhattan were taking part in a race of their own that evening, desperately trying to offload an assortment of soon-to-be-superannuated novelty goods: “Palin, McCain and Obama condoms … get screwed by both parties!” one vendor cried…