Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
A Breakthough for This Year: New Holiday Birds-Eye View Debuting
We woke reasonably late following the feast and free flowing wine the night before. After gathering ourselves and our packs, we headed down to our homestay family’s small dining room for breakfast. Refreshingly, what was expected of her was the same thing that was expected of Lara Stone: to take a beautiful picture. We were…
Computer Filters Noise to Make You a Better Listener
We woke reasonably late following the feast and free flowing wine the night before. After gathering ourselves and our packs, we headed down to our homestay family’s small dining room for breakfast. Refreshingly, what was expected of her was the same thing that was expected of Lara Stone: to take a beautiful picture. We were…
This New Headphone from Sony Cancel Out Almost Every Background
We woke reasonably late following the feast and free flowing wine the night before. After gathering ourselves and our packs, we headed down to our homestay family’s small dining room for breakfast. Refreshingly, what was expected of her was the same thing that was expected of Lara Stone: to take a beautiful picture. We were…
Plagues and Portents
In Shakespeare, the word ‘honour’, with its derivatives and variants, occurs more than 900 times. Among abstract nouns only ‘love’ and ‘time’ are used more often. Honour imposes heavy responsibilities both on those who feel they are endowed with it,…
Yeats Now: Echoing into Life
Yeats Now: Echoing into Life, by Joseph M. Hassett, was published by Lilliput Press in September. Below we reprint its introduction. The Dublin Review of Books will publish a review of the work in the new year.
Hear the Silence
Derek Mahon is not a poet to calm or ease the mind. He keeps us alert, thinking, in flux. It is hard to accept that ‘Washing Up’ will be his last word. Perhaps this is the greatest gift, that this…
Trapped
In the early decades of the independent state, a woman who wished to flee her husband’s violence encountered a host of economic, legal and social obstacles. She had few legal remedies and no access to divorce. She was almost certain…
Against the Vanishing
Throughout her new collection, Mary O’Donnell proves herself a smooth stylist, converting ideas, emotions, opinions into genuine poems that have a visible and an invisible subject. It helps that her imagination is a sturdy one.
Looking Through You
Below is an extract from Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles by Gerard Dawe, published this summer by Merrion Press at €18.
The Impossibility of Memory
When Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, the great oral epic of Western culture, was written down, something changed forever. There is a sense in which ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, a lament first uttered in 1773, marks the last ripple outward from that momentous…
‘Staunch Fine Gael’
Garret FitzGerald, who had voted Fianna Fáil in 1961, believed his own thinking to be closer to Labour and he and other party liberals positively sought coalition to ensure that socially progressive policies which were unlikely to have commended themselves…
The Case of the Vanishing Phantom
The supernatural tale thrived for over 100 years from about 1830, but now seems to exist only as pastiche. In the Internet age, no voice need be silent or stifled any more, even if no one is listening. The ghost…