Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Mapping the Revival
A handsome new publication provides a survey of that period of ferment and rejuvenation that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘fashioned a new civic culture outside the scope of institutional religion, the colonial state and conventional politics’.
Reasonable Doubt
A study of Joyce’s literary use of the law by the late Adrian Hardiman stresses the writer’s ‘persistent assertion of the need for philosophical and judicial doubt as a proper, moral and humane reaction to the inadequacy of evidence’.
Compassion, Empathy, Flapdoodle
Neuroscientific speculation has escaped from the laboratory and is now the rickety foundation for scores of bestselling, populist books. The sceptical writer and journalist Steven Poole has described the phenomenon as ‘an intellectual pestilence’ and ‘neurotrash’.
The Russian Troika
The history that played out for Lenin and his commissars, who assumed dictatorial powers, was built on tactical opportunism coupled with simple good luck. One of the first acts was the setting up of the Cheka political police, with the…
Time After Time
Not bound to swear allegiance to any master, wherever the wind takes me I travel as a visitor. Drop the question what tomorrow may bring, and count as profit every day that Fate allows you.
Beyond Anger
There is now a steady flow of books trying to explain what Derek Mahon, in a welcome recent return to poetry, referred to as “the age of unbeauty, rage and anger”. One of the first out of the traps was…
Those Who Remain
Julia O’Mahony is a writer, living and working in Dublin. She currently contributes literary features to Totally Dublin magazine, as well as pieces on current affairs, book releases, and cultural goings-on in the Dublin area. She is the winner of the Pete…
Whiskey In The Jar
Keith Payne was the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award winner for 2015/2016. His collection Broken Hill (Lapwing Publications) was published in 2015. It was followed in 2016 by Six Galician Poets (Arc Publications) .
The City Spreads Out
Dublin is often eulogised for its houses’ brickwork and fanlights, for its smoky bars and pseudo-poets declaiming over stout and whiskey, but a short walk from the centre of the city are places which are more interesting and more important…
Deep Work at Dollarton
1947 saw the publication of Under the Volcano, a novel written by a prodigiously hapless alcoholic who had spent much of the previous decade occupying a squatter’s shack in the Canadian boondocks.
A Soul in Wonder
Michael Longley has said that he hopes that by the time he dies his work will look like four really long poems: “a very long love poem; a very long meditation on war and death;
In Love With Death
When ISIS declared the caliphate in 2014, initial analyses highlighted a new terrorist logic at odds with that of previous forms of jihadi terrorism.