Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
This Is Who He Is
The West has no reason whatever to be surprised by Putin’s invasion
In the Dirt Lay Justice
Derry’s Bloody Sunday and the long fight for justice and accountability
The Mystery of Moll
Linguistic paradoxes and the evasion of identity in ‘Moll Flanders’
It’s Not All Bad
Term report: wealth, good; population, v. good; equality, could do better
The Night Walker
As the lamps come on, thoughts of a connoisseur of the crepuscular
Getting Even
A personal history of the new Irish feminism of the 1970s
An Teanga on Tour
Gaelic Ireland’s many encounters with continental European culture
A German Requiem
Fashion model, rocker, poet, addict: the strange life of the singer Nico
Getting Known
A memoir of Patrick Kavanagh, the reflections of Thomas McCarthy
The Banana Bunch
Vargas Llosa’s study of the overthrow of democracy and reform in Guatemala
At last to Ithaca
Derek Mahon: a poetic style balanced between levity and profundity
Preaching Poppycock
Yeats’s authoritarianism: the Rapallo circle and Italian fascism