Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Silent Symphony
Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Michael Murphy & Jan Smaczny (eds), Four Courts Press, 336 pp, €55, ISBN: 978-1846820243 That Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland should be the ninth in a series of Irish Musical Studies might not strike the general reader as anything remarkable. But such continuity of effort (under the general editorship of Gerald Gillen and Harry…
Ancestral Vices
Soldier, Sailor: An Intimate Portrait of an Irish Family, by Eliza Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 312 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-0297843771 Soldier Sailor has many charms. It’s a clever concept – a young member of a well-known Anglo-Irish family wishes to find out who the subjects of the oil paintings on the walls of the dining room…
Lost in the Jungle
His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey, Faber & Faber, 272pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0571231515 Peter Carey is lost in the jungle. It’s not the concrete jungle of his more recent home, New York City, but the jungle that is more properly called “the bush”, the anarchic forest of his native Australia. A masterful novelist, one of…
History Is To Blame
Books drawn on in this essay include: The Plot Against Samuel Pepys, by James and Ben Long, Faber and Faber, 322 pp, £17.99, ISBN: 978-0571227136 The Diaries of Samuel Pepys – a Selection, Robert Latham (ed), Penguin, 1,152 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-0141439938 The Glorious Revolution: 1688 – Britain’s Fight for Liberty, by Edward Vallance, Abacus,…
The First Egoist
How to Read Montaigne, by Terence Cave, Granta, 133 pp, £6.99, ISBN: 978-1862079441 On the last day of November 1580, the French landowner and writer Michel de Montaigne arrived with his company and servants in Rome, the ultimate goal of a journey on which he had set out, from his family estate in southwestern France,…
Not All Roses
Reality Check, by Dennis O’Driscoll, Anvil, 80 pp, £7.95, ISBN: 978-0856464027 Dennis O’Driscoll has given us a lot to read and a lot to think about over the past decade. An extraordinary five books of his poetry have appeared during this period. Quality Time (1997) and Weather Permitting (1999) were followed by Exemplary Damages in…
Cruelty, Grievance, Denial
The Highland Clearances: The People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil, by Eric Richards, Birlin, Edinburgh, 377 pp, £9.99, ISBN: 978-1841580401. Clearances and Improvement: Land, Power and People in Scotland 1700-1900, by TM Devine, John Donald, Edinburgh, 284 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0859766951 The drama of Highland history since 1700 has attracted the interest of many historians and…
English Eggheads
Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, by Stefan Collini, Oxford University Press, 544 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0199216659 Culture is always something that was Something pedants can measure, Skull of bard, thigh of chief, depth of dried up river, Shall we be thus forever? Shall we be thus forever? Patrick Kavanagh, “In Memory of Brother Michael” …
Lifting the Boats
Saving the Future: How Social Partnership Shaped Ireland’s Economic Success By Tim Hastings, Brian Sheehan & Padraig Yeates, Blackhall Publishing, 200 pp, €25, ISBN: 978-1842181355 The economic boom in Ireland since the early 1990s has seen the economy grow by over 140 per cent and Irish standards of living rise from 70 per cent of…
Voices of the Dispossessed
Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory, by Guy Beiner, University of Wisconsin Press, 488 pp, £28.95, ISBN: 978-0299218201 Leabhar Mhaidhc Dháith: Scéalta agus Seanchas ón Rinn, ed Máirtín Verling, An Sagart An Díseart An Daingean , ISBN: 978-1903896320 In her survey of Hungarian folklore genres Linda Dégh remarked, with…
The Modernist Volcano
Ezra Pound: Poet (A Portrait of the Man and his Work) I: The Young Genius 1885-1920, by A David Moody, Oxford University Press, 544 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0199215577 In a poem, “Monumentum Aere, Etc.”, first published in 1914 in Blast, a short-lived but highly influential magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis that styled itself the “Review of the…
Fencing Ireland’s Poets
Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality, by Michelle O’Riordan, Cork University Press, 455 pp, €55.00, ISBN: 978-1859184141 There’s an odd European country which loves to make a fuss about its writers and has brought the commercial exploitation of six or eight of them to a peak of perfection. But strange to say, that self-same country…