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Spring 2026
Welcome to the latest issue, which includes John Alderdice on biographies of John Hume and David Trimble, a new poem from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Stefan Collini on James Bryce’s once great reputation, Quassim Cassam on bullshit, Lynsey Black on Presbyterian piety and promiscuity, Lori Allen on the plight of Palestinians and other strangers, Eoin O’Malley on the enigma of Leo Varadkar, Ruby Eastwood on the young Virginia Woolf, Maurice Earls on the rise, fall and possible revival of Irish Catholicism, our new Rereadings series featuring Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and more.
The publication of our Spring issue marks the launch of the drb’s new website. Among its features are a more powerful search facility, better archive layout, and improved mobile-friendly viewing on smartphones and tablets. Further enhancements to the website are planned, all with the aim of making the drb an enjoyable online reading experience.
This is the first of four issues coming out this year. Each season will bring a new drb issue offering original, engaging copy on a broad range of themes from the arts and imaginative literature to history, politics and ideas. Blogs will continue to be published between issues.
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date, Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish.
Michael Laver writes: While ‘The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t’ by Didi Kuo adds to a burgeoning ‘decline of parties’ literature, are we to…
Bess Rowen writes: 11 February 2026 marked a century since protesters disrupted Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ by singing nationalist songs and rushing the stage.
Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed…
A new biography of James Bryce, one time Chief Secretary of Ireland and supporter of Irish Home Rule, reveals the astonishingly varied and accomplished life of a long forgotten ‘greatest living Englishman’. This is an outstanding work of intellectual history,…
Katrina Goldstone pays tribute to her much missed friend and mentor, the poet and scholar Gerald Dawe (1952-2024). By reflecting on his distinctive cosmopolitan sensibility, what his wife, Dorothea Melvin, dubbed ‘his European soul’, we get a surer grasp of…
Two new studies of the plight of Palestinians and other strangers offer a glimpse of how we might hold on to solidarity as strategy and human principle. Dolefully or otherwise, writes Lori Allen, we have all been looking through our…
Poets, more than any other kind of writers or artists, are called upon to defend their impulses and pretensions. This is particularly true in times in political crisis which we are living through right now.
A skillful excavation of the ‘Presbyterian archive’ has produced a surprising and captivating history of Presbyterian life in eighteenth century Ulster, a veritable Bridgerton on the Bann. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary records including letters, diaries, newspapers and…
It may be comforting to assert that one’s political enemies are bullshitters but one can’t help wondering whether this assertion is itself a piece of bullshit.
If there was nothing inevitable about the expansion of liberty for lesbians and gay men and today nothing inevitable about the future maintenance of that liberty, what should be the strategy of the lesbian and gay rights movement?
Welcome to a new series called ‘Rereadings’ in which writers are invited to consider a notable work of their own or of another author. Our first instalment features the reflections of Richard Kraut on Allan Bloom’s ‘The Closing of the…