Wild Child
Early to late: questions about the conventional Jane Austen timeline
For later commentators hostile to the social milieu portrayed in her fiction or scornful of her characters’ immense decorum, Jane Austen came to represent the antithesis of the natural and authentic: polite but repressed, clever but buttoned-up. Yet a perusal of her teenage writings reveals a young woman who was tough, unsentimental and mischievous, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes, qualities that are sublimated but not absent in her later published works, in spite of the sad case of the priggish Fanny Price.
A Revolutionary’s Life
An affectionate portrait of Ernie O’Malley in war and in exile
Family Troubles
Nobel laureate Louise Glück’s poetic use of figures from Greek mythology
Wheeler Dealers
Luke Cassidy’s novel of drug deals, heists and mess-ups along the border
Making Israel Unreal
Opinion: The faulty thinking of the boycott and divestment campaign
Caldron Bubble
Where the line that separates our lives from chaos seems alarmingly thin
From out of the Box
Vona Groarke marshals her strengths to poems notably apt for ‘these times’
Hello to Berlin
Dropping in, not dropping out: Irish emigrants find a new destination
Where To Next?
Joe Cleary explores world literature and Irish literature’s place in it
Down on the Farm
Farming, land and land hunger as a theme in modern Irish literature
Are We Civilised at All?
Fintan O’Toole’s personal narrative of Ireland’s ‘ascent to normality’
On the Brink
Breaking away from the empire: the dilemma of the 1921 Treaty negotiators
The Reunion
Leonard Cohen’s fusion of sacred and profane, of words and music
When it came to the sacred and the profane, Leonard Cohen liked to shake it up, seeing love and sex in sacramental terms, yet suffering crippling guilt. His and Dylan’s great achievement was to return poetry to its traditional marriage with music. One can analyse Cohen’s words without the music, but it’s like discussing form and content: neither actually exists without the other. The music can be played without the lyrics or the lyrics printed without the music: but neither of these is the song.
Blogs et cetera
How can you sell Killarney?
Enda O’Doherty writes: One of the more amusing moments in the neither long nor glorious history of far-right politics in Ireland came in the late 1990s when an election candidate carrying the banner for Ireland for the Irish expounded on the (many) reasons why immigration was a bad thing. The particular one that has stuck in my mind was its supposedly negative effect on our tourism industry. People come on holiday to Ireland, the candidate argued, not just for the scenery but to meet Irish people and to sample our culture. If the people they actually encounter, at the...
Governments in every country seem to be just as much in favour of culture as they once were of motherhood. They are, to varying degrees, prepared to finance it, to subsidise those persons and organisations who help ‘make it happen’. Yet there are others who would prefer to see it put to work, to earn its keep by hauling in the tourists or serving a political agenda.