• Autumn 2026

    Welcome to the latest issue which includes Michael Ignatieff on captive minds; Emer Nolan on a new biography of James Joyce; Conor McCarthy on Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning; a new poem by Vona Groarke, the current Ireland Professor of Poetry; Kevin Stevens’ interview with the novelist Ben Markovits; Ewan Fernie on Shakespeare as thinker; Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh on ancient Gaelic warriors; Robert Gildea on the fate of Jews in Vichy France; Maurice Earls on Daniel O’Connell; Steven Smith on Isaiah Berlin; Daniel Gordon on the tyranny of choice; and Martin Tyrrell revisits Catcher in the Rye; Cover photo by Ellen Fitzpatrick.

    The next issue of the drb is due out on December 1 featuring, John Banville on Robert Louis Stevenson; Catherine Cox on the Magdalene laundries; Ronan McDonald on Brian Dillon’s ambivalence; Sinead O’Sullivan on Marianna Mazzucato’s The Common Good Economy; Brian Ó Curnáin on a new history of the Celts; Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty; and Derek Hand on the latest edition of Joyce’s Dubliners.

Latest Blogs

  • Death as a Career Move

    Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move.

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  • 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.

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  • 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

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Literary Life | Literature | World Literature

Death as a Career Move

Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move.
Johnny Lyons
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 | Literature

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