• Soaking up the summer sun in the Pheonix Park. Photo by Liam Slattery

    Summer 2026

    Welcome to the latest issue which includes Edna Longley on Seamus Heaney’s Collected Poems; Kevin Power on the Dunblane massacre; Luke Gibbons on the world of John McGahern; a new poem by James Harpur;  Yvonne Galligan on Charlie Haughey and Garret Fitzgerald; Paul Seabright on wealth and empires; Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh on the genesis of Irish modernity; Carla King on politics and dirty hands; Julian Padraic Young on the alleged virtue of hope; Enda O’Doherty on the far-right in France; Patricia Thane on the rise of miserablism in Britain; Charlie Lynch on illicit love in modern Ireland; Ruth Harris revisits her award-winning study of Alfred Dreyfus in our Rereadings series; Eamon Maher on Proustian thoughts from Ireland; David O’Connor on Rob Doyle’s latest novel; and Brian S Campbell on reinventing the Italian Renaissance.

    The next issue of the drb is due out on September 1 and will feature a new poem by Vona Groarke, the current Ireland Professor of Poetry; Conor McCarthy on Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning; Wolfgang Streeck on the matter of Europe’s future; Simon Blackburn on the Oxbridge philosopher and public intellectual Bernard Williams; Martin Tyrrell on Catcher in the Rye; and Emer Nolan on a new biography of James Joyce

Latest Blogs

  • We need to write about diabetes

    Kieran Fionn Murphy writes: Depictions of type 2 diabetes remain virtually absent from English-language novels, even though 589 million people worldwide have the disease. A mere mention of a character with type 2 diabetes who isn’t feckless, gluttonous, evil or dissolute, even as an aside, could help a vast, marginalised population feel recognised.

    Read More

  • Toast in the face of authority

    David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag, two aliens on a couch, telling each other and occasionally the nation to feck off.

    Read More

  • An unlikely political animal

    Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s 'Tropic of Cancer'. It was many years later that I would learn the book’s significance.

    Read More

In This Issue

Read Current Issue
Poetry

When More is Less

Edna Longley

This colossal volume of Heaney’s poems ‘almost disguises the fact that he is a poet by entombing his lyric in a mass of annotation, exegesis and “uncollected” poems’.

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Poetry

John McGahern’s World

Luke Gibbons

The deliberate blurring of inside and outside is central to McGahern’s vision, the writer at once being absorbed in his surroundings and yet stepping back to articulate what goes without saying on the daily round.

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From The Blog

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Blog Articles | Society | World Literature

We need to write about diabetes

Kieran Fionn Murphy writes: Depictions of type 2 diabetes remain virtually absent from English-language novels, even though 589 million people worldwide have the disease. A mere mention of a character with type 2 diabetes who isn’t feckless, gluttonous, evil or dissolute, even as an aside, could help a vast, marginalised population feel recognised.
Johnny Lyons
Blog Articles

Toast in the face of authority

David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag, two aliens on a couch, telling each other and occasionally the nation to feck off.
Johnny Lyons
Blog Articles

An unlikely political animal

Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’. It was many years later that I would learn the book’s significance.
Johnny Lyons
Blog Articles

Homer lives

John Simmons writes: Is Homer the most influential writer of all time? We don’t know much about whoever he, she or they might have been, and we don’t know with any certainty how old the Iliad and the Odyssey are. They brought us the power of storytelling, and for that we should give them the highest praise.
Johnny Lyons
Society

Spring colours in Zaporizhia

Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment door.
Johnny Lyons
Politics

Elites and / or / versus Democracy

Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection throws some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on the centre right and centre left.
Johnny Lyons