Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Just Live
Life … is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills. Virginia Woolf What is the meaning of life? The question always makes my mind go blank. Then a negative answer comes. It has none. It has no more meaning than a cubic metre of space 17,000 miles above my head. What if I…
A Bodyguard of Lies
Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s Nutting Squad, and the British Spooks who ran the War, by Richard O’Rawe, Merrion Press, 254 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374470 The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money, by Jennifer O’Leary, Merrion Press, 256 pp, €18.99, ISBN:…
Pétain’s Gift
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, by Julian Jackson, Allen Lane, 445 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241450253 The essence of a nation is that all the individuals constituting it will have many things in common; and also that they will all have forgotten many things. Ernest Renan On August 25th, 1944, four years and…
Double Exposure
The images have a true aim: direct and unpretentious, yet atmospheric. Their texture and visual sonority are honest: expressive monochrome, confident perspective, calibrations of grey and no tricks or tints, as characterised some early photography from the nineteenth Century. Some pictures are documentary of the time, showing an excitement at modernity as the industrial revolution…
Endgame in Paris
On February 13th 1936, the French socialist leader Léon Blum left the Palais Bourbon in Paris, the site of the lower house of parliament, to travel the relatively short distance to his home on the île Saint-Louis. He was driven by Georges Monnet, a friend and colleague, and they were accompanied by Monnet’s wife, Germaine….
The First of a New Genus
Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age, by Daisy Hay, Vintage, 528 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 978-1784701079 The Garrick Club in the West End of London was founded in 1831, making it one of the oldest gentlemen’s clubs in the world; for almost two hundred years women have been allowed in only…
Big House to Little House
Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination, by Eve Patten, Oxford University Press, 228 pp, £65, ISBN: 978-0198869160 When Karl Marx looked to the militancy of the Fenian movement, and the émigré Irish in industrial centres, to awaken the English labour movement from its political slumbers, he could hardly have foreseen the parodic turn this…
The Conditions of Liberty
He is most powerful who is in his own power. Seneca The strength of our nation must be the strength of the whole people. Michael Collins i…
Whole Lotta Shakin’
One thing that endeared my in-laws to me was that they held on to my wife’s collection of 45s – her records, I mean, not her (non-existent) collection of other revolvers. True, they were buried in a box under crumpled high-school decals, spineless paperbacks and ratty college notebooks. But there they were: originals of ‘Please…
A Life of Journeys
Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, by Peter Brown, Princeton University Press, 736 pp, £38, ISBN: 978-0691242286 As a young boy growing up in the 1930s in a Dublin Protestant family, Peter Brown could have been personally acquainted with the unblessed coupling of politics with religion long before he wrote about its presence…
There Will Be Blood
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin, Allen Lane, 240 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241553480 Peter Turchin is the founder of the discipline of ‘cliodynamics’ (Clio being the ancient Greek muse of history), a big-data-enabled approach to the study of history over the very long term. He is frank in…
The Two Milan Kunderas
There have for a while now been two Milan Kunderas, characters so different as to suggest Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There is Kundera the good European, celebrated as an eminent writer, a defender of freedom of speech, a voice of remembering against the politics of forgetting, and a spokesman for a mythical entity called…