However what was required was not direct political action so much as a change of consciousness in the minds of Italians. As such, Gobetti’s project was to be a long-term, gradual one which aimed to defeat fascism not for his…

Haven’t all local places got uniqueness, by definition, and hasn’t the whole island got “history”, sharing as the western seaboard does, for instance, the Famine? But then Wexford, Drogheda and Co Antrim could be said to have plenty of history…

Leitrim was fond of money: in his office at Lough Rynn he was Midas in his counting house … He took over an encumbered estate and debts of about £55,000. At his death his gross rental income was about £30,000…

O’Driscoll raises the matter of the many conferences, launches, conferrings and other public events in which Heaney participates. “Ongoing civic service, I suppose,” Heaney responds … Life has been good to him in many ways; poetry has enriched his existence…

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…