Marching on Rome
Fascism’s origins in violence and repression of the labouring poor
Nostalgia for fascism, which is alive and well in Italy today, centres on the belief that Benito Mussolini brought order to his nation, restored its pride after the First World War, made things work, including railway timetables, built fine buildings and drained the Pontine Marshes. Possibly fascism’s one great achievement was the electrification of the railways, but otherwise most of this is a carefully propagandised mythology. John Foot, in his new study, is unequivocal about this. Fascism was about violence and repression from the outset.
Greed or Good?
Business and politics: two views on how they should interact
Writers United
The pros and cons of bringing writers together in a corporate body
Full Throttle
Dark but exhilarating stories of surreal events and parallel universes
For Your Discomfort
Lullabies, but not the kind you’d want to sing to your baby
A Model for Everything
Maths, microeconomics and ‘losing sight of the bigger picture’
The Irish Reach
The influence of Gaels and Gaelic tradition on Old English poetry
Against the Tide
George Berkeley interprets the mysterious language of God
Flowers of Orwell
Putting economic and social justice at the heart of the ecological project
Hearts and Minds
The stubborn obstacles that stand in the way of a unitary state in Ireland
Hoping for the Best
An optimist examines the prospects of achieving Irish unification
Blackening Casement
British intelligence and the making of the ‘black diaries’ of Roger Casement
What Larks
Bridget Rose Dugdale, an English debutante on Irish active service
Dugdale and her comrades hit upon the wheeze of a bombing raid on Strabane RUC station using a hijacked helicopter; the pilot had initially been told the project was to photograph Tory Island from the air. The mission was somewhat misconceived. The milk churn bombs were too heavy and half of them had to be jettisoned. The one bomb that hit its target did little damage. Still, looking back after almost fifty years, Dugdale remembered the fiasco as the happiest day of her life. It was part and parcel of her high jinks approach to political activism.
Blogs et cetera
Javier Marías 1951-2022
Javier Marías, who died on Sunday in Madrid from pneumonia, contracted after a bout of Covid, was probably the Spanish writer best-known outside his native country. His work ‑ sixteen novels as well as many volumes of short stories and essays – was translated into more than forty languages. In English translation he may be best known for A Heart So White, which won the Dublin International Literary Prize in 1997, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and the trilogy Your Face Tomorrow.
Marias’s mother, Dolores Franco, was a professor of literature, and his father, Julián Marías, a philosopher,...
In his novels Marías avoided political subjects, preferring to dwell on the eternal themes of love, betrayal, secrets. ‘The history of literature,’ he wrote, ‘is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone, only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before.’