Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Helping Spain
‘But to me our real shame lies in our silence regarding Fascism. We must be anti Fascist or all our history is a lie.’ Thus wrote poet Ewart Milne to Muriel MacSwiney on May 19th, 1942, at a stage in World War Two when it was by no means certain that the forces of fascism…
We Done It
We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, Viking, 464 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-0241608364 Want a cosy mystery that takes place partly in Dublin, Cork, and RTÉ’s studios? We Solve Murders fits the bill. How about a cosy mystery with a grand, idiosyncratic detective champion? That’s not We Solve Murders. Marple. Maigret. Marlowe. Holmes. Poirot. Montalbano. Gamache….
Looking for an Enemy
Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (eds), Peter Lang, 298 pp, €49.40, ISBN: 978-1800790834 The publication of this volume could hardly have come at a worse time for its reception by a world outraged by the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinian civilians,…
The Evaporation of Hatred
In May 1909, Leonard Dunning, the head constable of Liverpool, wrote to the Home Office in London to warn that some very serious disturbances were looming in the city. Dunning had previously spent thirteen years in the Royal Irish Constabulary and, as he reminded Whitehall, ‘had a good deal of experience of troubles between Orangemen…
Power and the Polis
In much of the ancient world a city’s emblem was its walls. ‘O Ur-shanabi,’ proclaims the hero in the last lines of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ‘climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!’ Realising he cannot escape death, Gilgamesh takes comfort knowing the city walls of Uruk will be his legacy. The Old…
Written on Water
In a moving obituary in New Left Review, the great sociologist Stuart Hall noted Raphael Samuel’s talent for ‘quarrying’ lives and historical themes. Inadvertently or not, in employing this verb – it recurs three times in the relatively short text – Hall evokes one of his friend, comrade and colleague’s short studies, ‘Headington Quarry: Recording…
Semper Invicta
Warsaw Tales, edited by Helen Constantine and selected and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Oxford University Press, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0192855565 1/4 h west of Hohenstein on one of the highest points of the battlefield, the Tannenberg National Monument, 193m (shortly before on the road restaurant Tannenbergkrug with the Tannenberg battle relief, in summer…
The Case for the State
The largely successful growth of the world economy since 1945, which has seen hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty and continuing scientific and technological development, has been based on a system of multilateral global governance developed in the aftermath of World War II. That system of governance, which has been taken for…
The Nightmare of Gaza
You have been watching for fifteen months now the annihilation of Gaza? You have witnessed the ceaseless cascade of images of desperate families clawing massacred relatives from under astounding mountains of rubble? You have caught glimpses of people scooping body parts into white plastic bags? You have witnessed the shattered shells of what once were…
From Romance to Regret
The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, by Mateo Jarquin, The University of North Carolina Press, 336 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 978-1469678498 Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War, by Eline Van Ommen, University of California Press, 312 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0520390768 Sandinistas: A Moral History, by Robert J Sierakowski, University…
It’s My Party
On the wall near my home in Berlin, someone has sprayed a thoughtful observation: ‘Machen ist wie wollen, nur krasser’ – Doing is like wanting, just crazier. That could be the new political motto of Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most polarising politician of the left. Wagenknecht entered politics in 1990 and now, at fifty-five, is German…
Getting Away
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane, 384 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241540510 ‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just…