Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The German Friend
German writer Heinrich Böll was born in December 1917, one hundred years ago. Such anniversaries are a popular time to take stock, but not always the best way to gauge the ongoing impact and legacy of a writer. Likewise, to ask questions ‑ such as what would Böll have thought about reunification (which happened four…
Wandering in the Desert
Joyce is just one Irish writer who is alert to the Exodus story and its specific resonance within a national context. Hence the parallel between Moses and Parnell, each of whom ‘led a turbulent and unstable people from the house…
A Tale Retold
The Gothic novel has been entertaining and thrilling readers for centuries and while critics have often rejected it as showy, populist and over-formulaic, readers have responded more positively, returning to the genre first in novels, then in film and television…
Bohemian Travesty
The bohemians of Munich, who led its shortlived socialist republic in 1919, ‘are a foreign legion, kept for amusement and fun’, wrote Victor Klemperer. But whatever about their entertainment value in the arts, their contribution to governance was to prove…
Understanding the Alt-Right
Online culture is a strangely proportioned new world, and it needs a map. Into this space comes Angela Nagle’s persuasive essay ‘Kill All Normies’, which charts the frenetic online culture wars of the last decade, marking and delineating their evolving…
Family Troubles
A novel set in Ireland and in various of the theatres of the Second World war is based on the historical story of an Irish family of the minor gentry, who, like well over 100,000 other Irish citizens, took part…
What The People Thought
One will have a very impoverished and distorted view of the history of ‘the long eighteenth century’ if one relies on official documents, ignoring the poetry, songs and compositions of ordinary people, chiefly in the Irish language, which was often…
Selfless Radical
Whether as journalist, actress, propagandist or orator, Helena Molony played a very significant part in socialist, national and women’s struggles in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet for all her tireless activity, personally she could be extremely self-effacing.
The Pity of War
A study of war across the ages argues that our propensity to engage in such conflicts is not genetically determined but a matter of culture and can be combated by integration, mutual linkages of a practical and beneficial kind, and…
Home Affairs
From the 1990s onward the provision of homes for sale or rent was to become almost exclusively market-driven in Ireland. If individuals or families had the ability to pay they could purchase or rent homes. Without resources, however, they could…
Quick! What Would You Read?
Writing is tough, but Annie Dillard doesn’t put on a performance of her struggle to transmute experience into literature. She is a writer who believes – how old-fashioned! – in the possibility of truly powerful literature and its urgent importance,…
Defining Utopia
Utopian imaginings were alive and well in eighteenth century Ireland and could be found not just in pamphlets but in vision poems and travellers’ tales, speeches, manifestos and proclamations and the practical improving projects of philanthropic societies like the Dublin…