Swift was genuinely kind to the young couple, helping Matthew with his career as a clegyman and including them in his peculiar dinner parties at the deanery, which always involved contretemps with the servants over the quality of the food…

While some see the European Union as the only effective possible counterweight to “chaotic international networks and concentrations of power” others see it as another manifestation of globalisation, driven by a quasi-religious faith in the market, competition and privatisation. “This,”…

The adoption of an amendment process that required a referendum to approve any constitutional change can be explained by de Valera’s need to establish the people as the font of all authority and thereby marginalise extreme nationalists. More troubling is…

Since the Chinese production includes so much sexual display, we have to wonder whether it might not be deliberately, or even unconsciously, a Chinese Playboy version of Synge’s “Western World”. At the very least, we must wonder to what extent…

The Irish Literary Revival, alongside many other similar movements of the time, was an attempt to transform Ireland from what it seemed to be becoming – a derivative, provincial British backwater given to exaggerated bluster about its Irishness – into…

Actually these norms turn out not to be so unique – they are all but identical to the public school ethos as Orwell describes it. Thus sport can, at the very least, be seen as encouraging and condoning behaviour that…

The title of this poem, “City”, also calls to mind Roy Fisher’s 1961 collection of the same name and Fisher as a poet of the city – “Birmingham’s what I think with” as he famously remarked – is an important…

What Was Lost, by Catherine O’Flynn, Tindal Street Press, 242 pp, £8.99, ISBN: 978-0955138416 Of all British cities Birmingham has perhaps best reason to feel aggrieved by the work of the mid-twentieth century planners. Although the Luftwaffe mauled the area during the war, residents initially had good cause to expect a speedy recovery following VE…

Auf der Höhe der Zeit: Soziale Demokratie und Fortschritt im 21. Jahrhundert (Up to Date: Social Democracy and Progress in the 21st Century), by Matthias Platzeck, Peer Steinbrück and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Vorwärts Buch, 344 pp, €14.80, ISBN: 978-3866026292 In spite of a fair modicum of electoral success in recent years the main formation of the German…

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan, Faber & Faber, 163 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 978-0571233069 The story which has attracted most critical attention in this, Claire Keegan’s second collection, is one which she writes in explicit homage to John McGahern: “Surrender”. Inspired by an event recounted in his final work, Memoir, it focuses on an episode…

On Thursday June 11th, 1992 I spoke at a public meeting in Bray, Co Wicklow as part of the Maastricht Treaty referendum campaign. With colleagues, I strongly advocated a Yes vote and engaged in a quite intense debate with those arguing against the treaty. As we ended the formalities and made the usual enquiries about…

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, by Paul Bew, Oxford University Press, 652 pp, £35, ISBN: 978-0198205555 Paul Bew is an extremely intelligent, widely read, urbane, productive, original and extensively published historian with a sustained record of public engagement in politics. As an historian he professionally reads his way through multiple, and not just official,…