The palpable sense of the dead and living coming together that is the undeclared but unmistakable meaning of the hundreds of candles flickering in the reassuring darkness of Polish graveyards on All Souls’ Night recalls accounts of Samhain given by…

Most reviewers have concentrated on the couple’s wild sexual lives, but their political stupidity arguably ranks higher in the scale of immorality. Until the Second World War, both of these future champions of engaged literature were curiously uninterested in politics….

“Books can contain all sorts of dire and dour information, opinion, behaviour, and not be pessimistic themselves. I hold with Sartre who wrote that we can write about the darkest possible things and still be optimistic, inasmuch as those writings…

From McGovern through Dukakis, Kerry and perhaps now the junior senator from Illinois, the Democrats have never found a way to counteract Nixon’s characterisation of them as effete, unpatriotic liberals soft on crime and security and opposed to the sovereignty…

The liberators of two hundred years ago had as their sole aim to move out of the commercial and financial shadow of Spain and to trade wherever in the world they liked. It was not their ambition to bring a…

In a recent radio interview, Barry linked the character with that of a great-aunt who had been committed to an asylum in the 1920s and was subsequently hardly ever mentioned. When she was mentioned the comment was that “she was…

Many see Casement in a negative light; Séamas Ó Síocháin does not. He is both neutral and sympathetic. Ever avoiding judgment and letting the facts speak for themselves, he remains intrigued by Casement and in awe of his attainments. And…

Language organisations that pitch the language to this audience as part of Ireland’s valuable cultural heritage are on a hiding to nothing. The little Englander attitude towards languages – that they are all redundant in the face of English spoken…

In January 1947 Britain’s severest winter weather of the twentieth century hit, in tandem with a coal shortage. On location in Cardiff, Ronald Reagan shivered when the coin-operated heater in his Cardiff hotel ran out on one of the chilliest…

These words should send warning signals: most of the authors are exponents of a brand of African political sociology that is overly fond of neologisms and obscure typologies. Patrick Chabal talks about “neo-patrimonialism”; Christine Messiant writes about “the mutation of…

His liberalisation of the laws regulating abortion, homosexuality and divorce followed an idiosyncratic individualism which Trudeau saw as the logical outcome of his Catholic faith. Like a certain strand among Catholics in the Victorian era, Trudeau’s liberalism grew out of…