Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Boarding School Odyssey
Poems of youth recollected. informed by humour yet speaking of heartbreak
Blending In
Israel’s ‘first family’ reimagined in a hilariously conceived campus comedy
On the High Wire
John Berryman: a university poet in a society not much interested in poetry
At Bates Motel
Grief, addiction, abuse, self-harm, motherhood, breakdown, hilarity
Gimme Shelter
The schemes and stratagems that help the rich stay rich
Hard Power
Thucydides and the pursuit of domination through warfare
Walking the Wild Side
Wintering out in Mayo’s lonely glens and boglands
Witness to War
Peadar O’Donnell walks into Franco’s military revolt
Parents and Newcomers
Poetry and place: the case for transnationalism and translocalism
The Fascist Precursor
Fiume and the ‘poetic dictatorship’ of Gabriele d’Annunzio
The Light Fantastick
Dickens: master of imagination and verbal fancy footwork
A Grand Passion
Nora Barnacle’s life with ‘an envious, proud, lonely, discontented man’