Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Step Back, Make Space
A ‘peace’ consisting of two separate communities deterring each other from dominance in a fragile see-saw balance of power, where there is no real sharing in a common civic culture, is no real peace. What is required instead is Christian…
Revolution for Export
A major new study explores the relationship between the American and French revolutions and goes on to consider how events in the Thirteen States impacted on Canada, Ireland, Haiti, Spain and Latin America, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Greece in…
For Nothing
Groups which benefited hugely from NAMA were the lawyers, estate agents and surveyors whose businesses had been hit by the bursting of the bubble. As the government cut allowances for carers and deprived the chronically sick of medical cards, €2.6…
Sons and Mothers
Writers and their mothers: Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin
The Quixote of Cant
George Orwell set himself the mission of uncovering and ‘calling out’ all forms of political lying and evasion, particularly those of the people he called ‘the boiled rabbits of the Left’. He often chose his targets well, though he was…
Making Russia Great Again
Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he plans to operate through an authoritarian state at home, while abroad he wishes Russia to be felt as a great power again, even if that means ‘breaking the American monopoly on the…
Love Me Why Don’t You?
Donald Trump may appear to thrive on antagonism – and indeed he has no trouble finding it – but he is also a man who is desperate for approbation. A populist with a totalitarian mindset, he is that strangest of…
Connoisseur of Foolishness
Today’s bulbous literary novels are remarkably tolerant of longueurs, asides and arbitrary disquisitions, says Thomas McGuane. That can be their virtue. Not so short stories. Short stories share some of the traits of poetry, which could scarcely tolerate the liberties…
Homosexuals, Drunks and Weirdos
The British recruited their intelligence officers from the top echelons of society. When many of them turned out to be working for the other side the popular press turned on this ‘elite’ and, arguably, all ‘elites’, with deleterious effects on…
On the Mend
The actor Stephen McGann has told, through the prism of health and illness, the story of his family over several generations, from their origins in Famine-scarred Roscommon, to the Liverpool slums and on to the postwar social progress which brought…
From Europe’s Borderlands
An exciting new bilingual anthology of Ukrainian poetry might remind us of a row of Soviet-era apartment blocks, with multiple kitchen windows open at the same time and different voices coming from inside. Put together, it is a melting pot…
Cut and Catch
While Tom French moves much further afield in several of the poems in his new collection, enlarging his range and what might be called his world view, it is to localism and ‘the small things of the day’ that he…