I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

POLITICS

The Monad Unchained

The Nazis conducted their genocide in secret, and took pains to ensure that this secrecy would survive the war. After the failed prisoner uprising of August 2nd, 1943 – when it was already clear to every sentient German that the war was as good as lost – the SS set about dismantling the death factory they had built at Treblinka, 80 kilometres north-east of Warsaw. The gas chamber was blown up and its bricks taken away by train. The mass burning of corpses had been under way since early 1943; now it went at double-speed. The mass graves were...
The most salient fact about Trump is not his cretinous authoritarianism or his venality or his narcissism or his degenerate verbal prose or his phobia of germs or his small hands or the fact that his psychopathic father never loved him. It is that he does not care or even think about anyone but himself. He is the ignorant culmination of America’s worst idea, individualism. This is the American variant of fascism, patented by Ayn Rand, perfected by Trump.

PHILOSOPHERS

A ‘Sublime’ Friendship

Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own. Isaiah Berlin They were indeed potentially quite incompatible. Isaiah Berlin, born in 1909, was fourteen years older than Richard Wollheim,  and, coming into the world either side of the First World War, the two men had their roots in different centuries. Though they both made unique contributions to twentieth century British philosophy, their work... Equality, fairness, inherited wealth, class privilege and racial discrimination were all-consuming issues in postwar Britain. Atlee’s Labour government seemed to bring the chance to establish a socialist society of the kind that British intellectuals had been dreaming of for the previous fifty years and more. British public opinion was mostly repelled by the despotism prevailing in Soviet Russia and disgusted when the Russians invaded Hungary, but a moral question remained whether an egalitarian system was not superior in decency.

Dublin Review of Books

SCIENCE AND FAITH

A Crack in the Cosmos

If Jesus was McDonald, a fellow with a great burger shack, St Paul was Ray Kroc, establishing the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing standardising directives to Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians and Thessalonians. He erected a warm and personal supernatural system to stand against the cold, impersonal natural system of science. Indeed the global franchise itself grew out of the war of faith against Greek science.

FICTION

Different Colonisations

The ethnic makeup of this Indian ocean island is complex. The Zarabes are North Indian Muslims, the Zoreils are whites from metropolitan France, the Malabars are Hindu Tamils, the Yabs are poor whites, also known as ‘petits blancs’ while the rich families who own the coffee, nutmeg, vanilla and sugar plantations are the ‘gros blancs’. It’s not so much a melting-pot as a lasagne. The Swiftian narrator judges her birthplace harshly: 'a heap of rubble'.

IRISH FOREIGN POLICY

A Long Way to Peace

The man appointed as secretary of state was William Whitelaw, whose gentlemanly and sometimes bumbling manner concealed a sharp political brain. In summer 1972 he made an abortive attempt to negotiate secretly with the IRA. The talks produced no progress, and a brief IRA ceasefire ended. Irish officials reported that John Hume told them that ‘at the request of the IRA … an internee, Mr Adams, had been released from Long Kesh today’.

ORIGINS

G’wan the Normies!

Here’s a question. If the Normans, with whom it is has been claimed all our troubles began, were playing Transnistria, or some other faraway land, should we be up for the Normans? Well no, of course not! But hold on … maybe we should. After all, there are Norman surnames all around us. Aengus Ó Snodaigh’s mother, the distinguished artist Cliodhna Cussen, had one. My own name could be Norman. The person beside you on the bus might be one of them. Maybe we should avoid stirring things and just say: ‘Well, even if the Normans did some bad things,... The signature Norman work of asset-grabbing was completed within a generation of the Battle of Hastings, when England was effectively controlled by around 250 people. Beneath the top tier were about 2,000 landed knights and beneath them around 8,000 new settlers, not all of them especially powerful. In all, about 10,000 Normans came to Britain around the time of the conquest. Ireland’s land records were lost to fire in 1305, but they would have shown that the top Norman tier here numbered about 25 people.

JOYCEAN DUBLIN

A Jewish Patriot

An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce’s Dublin, and Ulysses: The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman, by Neil R Davison, University Press of Florida, 173 pp, $85, ISBN: 978-0813069555 Albert Altman (1853-1903) was born in what he called ‘Prussian Poland’ (probably the Duchy of Posen, which had a large Jewish population) and came to Ireland most likely the next year with his parents, Moritz and Deborah, and his sister, Sarah. Moritz quickly established himself in the Capel Street area of Dublin as a hatmaker and tailor, and possibly an unlicensed moneylender, and became quite prosperous. With the assistance of his son...
One of the most interesting issues that arose while Altman was on the council was the visit of King Edward VII to Dublin, an episode that is central to the story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. The matter was highly contentious. A unionist member declared that his majesty deserved ‘a right hearty and true Irish welcome’ but Altman, consistent with his nationalist politics, voted against presenting an address of welcome.

SCHOOLDAYS

Rule by Kindness

  When the idea of reviewing Tom Dunne’s memoir was put to me, I hesitated. Years ago, I had resolved not to review books written by friends or close acquaintances. On the whole, despite, some regrets, it made life simpler and the expression of opinion less fraught. Where or how, in any case, did Tom Dunne stand on such scales? Certainly, I used to meet him on occasion in the 1980s and ’90s during my visits to Cork to see my mother and father, then my father only, and some friends. I can’t remember exactly when these occasional meetings with Tom began. The fact that he was a co-editor of The Irish Review, as I was of Graph, was a factor from the mid-’80s on, but these were agenda-less meetings: I simply respected Tom and enjoyed his company and conversation. After my father’s death, soon enough followed by the disappearance of a family base in the city, I was a far less frequent visitor to Cork; our chats, with no falling-out or formal suspension, came to a halt about twenty years ago. So, did I feel like reviewing The Good Boy? (I had yet to read it.) A few other mouse-thoughts were nibbling at some corner of my mind. The book did not seem to be a late episode in the history wars and I didn’t want to be drawn into that over-familiar territory (though I couldn’t help noticing the Eoghan Harris endorsement in the blurb). If revisiting in memory the New Ross of Tom Dunne’s childhood and early education was central to the book, New Ross, where my favourite maternal uncle had lived and taught, was already occupying, more than it...
I was intrigued by the fact that Tom cited the French Renaissance humanist Montaigne as an influence on his thinking and on the composition of ‘The Good Boy’. I cannot recall any great enthusiasm for Montaigne when as students we read a slim selection of the 'Essais' at UCC. But as Tom notes, certain writers reveal themselves more fully to readers of a certain age.

ENTERTAINMENT

Reality Bites

  Emily Nussbaum  is a Pulitzer-prize-winning writer at The New Yorker magazine who has specialised in TV criticism. Her current book, Cue the Sun, recounts and analyses the invention and growth of ‘Reality’ TV, and the far-reaching implications of that development –– both on and off our TV screens. Her book’s enigmatic title comes from a line in The Truman Show – a movie that Nussbaum credits as being ahead of its time in addressing some of the critical issues raised by the emergence of so many ‘unscripted’ TV series. Nussbaum’s book is exceptionally well-informed and well-written. In several important respects, it casts new light on the history and pre-history of a vital part of TV production. The origins of Reality TV, she argues, pre-date the presence of television in our lives, the true founder of what is now a universal genre being a man called Alan Funt. As a young man, Funt had been employed in the radio department of a New York advertising agency. When he was drafted into the US army in 1943, he was assigned to work in the Forces Radio service that was part of the Army Signal Corps. His job entailed interviewing ordinary GIs about their lives and experiences, but he found that, once the tapes began to roll, they often became inhibited and tongue-tied. Eventually, he found a way round this problem – by using hidden microphones so that the soldiers did not know when they were being recorded, leading to much more open, truthful and revealing interviews. After the war, Funt worked for a local radio station and began to use hidden microphones to record people in everyday situations – often choosing those...
Trump was widely regarded as an incorrigible self-publicist, 'a tabloid joke' whose career had been marked by successive scandals and bankruptcies. I made a film about him for the BBC and I can recall how familiar and preoccupied he seemed to be with the world of TV entertainment – often citing popular programmes and commenting critically on their stars.

FROM PREVIOUS ISSUES

POLITICS

The Monad Unchained

The most salient fact about Trump is not his cretinous authoritarianism or his venality or his narcissism or his degenerate verbal prose or his phobia of germs or his small hands or the fact that his psychopathic father never loved him. It is that he does not care or even think about anyone but himself. He is the ignorant culmination of America’s worst idea, individualism. This is the American variant of fascism, patented by Ayn Rand, perfected by Trump.

PHILOSOPHERS

A ‘Sublime’ Friendship

Equality, fairness, inherited wealth, class privilege and racial discrimination were all-consuming issues in postwar Britain. Atlee’s Labour government seemed to bring the chance to establish a socialist society of the kind that British intellectuals had been dreaming of for the previous fifty years and more. British public opinion was mostly repelled by the despotism prevailing in Soviet Russia and disgusted when the Russians invaded Hungary, but a moral question remained whether an egalitarian system was not superior in decency.

SCIENCE AND FAITH

A Crack in the Cosmos

If Jesus was McDonald, a fellow with a great burger shack, St Paul was Ray Kroc, establishing the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing standardising directives to Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians and Thessalonians. He erected a warm and personal supernatural system to stand against the cold, impersonal natural system of science. Indeed the global franchise itself grew out of the war of faith against Greek science.

FICTION

Different Colonisations

The ethnic makeup of this Indian ocean island is complex. The Zarabes are North Indian Muslims, the Zoreils are whites from metropolitan France, the Malabars are Hindu Tamils, the Yabs are poor whites, also known as ‘petits blancs’ while the rich families who own the coffee, nutmeg, vanilla and sugar plantations are the ‘gros blancs’. It’s not so much a melting-pot as a lasagne. The Swiftian narrator judges her birthplace harshly: 'a heap of rubble'.

Blog

The Value of a Life

Ryan Breeden writes: In March 2018, members of Germany’s...
Disability and ‘racial hygiene’

Blog

Trump, Harvard, Free Speech

Kevin Stevens writes: I play pickleball several times a...
The vocabulary constabulary

Blog

Lines of Vision

Ben Keatinge writes: The Amergin Step is a book...
Listening to the landscape

Blog

A ‘Red’ in St Peter’s

This blog was written before the death of Pope...
Bringing the papacy to book

ART

A Vertical Letter

Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute, by Nicholas Fox Weber, Alfred A Knopf, 639 pp, £33, ISBN: 978-0307961594 ‘Van Gogh and Gauguin were having an argument about whether physical pain was worse than spiritual pain,’ explained Mondrian. ‘Van Gogh said physical pain was nothing. And to prove it, then and there, he cut off his ear. I’d have done the same. When I was young, I was just as stubborn.’   DIAGONAL, from Greek diagōnios (‘from angle to angle’) Was the way he’d cut that thing some kind of retort, a provocation? Or with a new friend on the way to take his picture and in so doing fix his image for a century, had nerves got the better as his hand snipped away at the mirror? About the moustache he had on him, in 1926, when André Kertész called into his studio in Paris, for me the curious thing is not how little time would have to pass before its style became synonymous with Hitler; nor is it the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, whose films he may or may not have seen. About Piet Mondrian’s moustache, in 1926, for me the curious thing is its shape. A far cry from the ‘perfectly squared thick black dash’ he had worn since 1922, according to this new biography by Nicholas Fox Weber, that thing beneath his nose does little to establish that ‘even the human head could be a vehicle for ruler-straight lines’. When the fifty-five-year-old abstractionist stared into the camera in 1926, that ‘squared’ tuft of hair was, at best, squarish. The briefest look reveals a baseline far lower on its right than on its left, with the...
When did Mondrian start wearing glasses? I’d quite like to know. Yet strangely for a biography of a painter, especially a biography of this painter, about whom we learn that as a child he refrained from all play out of a paranoid fear of injuring his eyes, there is scant information, no information in fact, about the condition of his eyesight.

REVOLUTION

Spurning the Dust

Tom Wall 0
  Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J Casey, Footnote Press, 404 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-804440995 Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, by Brigitte Studer, Verso Books, 496 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-1839768019 American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, by Julia L Mickenberg, University of Chicago Press, 426pp, $38, ISBN: 978-0226256122 What is it about millennials and their conceit about changing the world? The most politically committed of those born around the dawn of the twentieth century were that arrogant. They believed they knew better than their parents, their bosses,... Alexandra Kollontai, a leading revolutionary who was on the central committee of the Bolshevik party, married twice and had a succession of lovers. In her autobiography she titled herself, ‘A Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman’. However, her concept of sexual emancipation appalled Lenin, who accused her of promulgating what he called 'the glass of water theory'. This arose after she was alleged to have said that ‘the sex act should be viewed as equivalent to drinking a glass of water’. In fact this is not an accurate account of what she said.

BIOGRAPHY

A Failure to Return

John Montague: A Poet’s Life, by Adrian Frazier, Lilliput Press, 500 pp, €24.95, ISBN: 978-1843519102 A serious biography, properly considered, is a very curious kind of book. It takes a certain nerve on the part of the author to venture on what the reader must hope will be a fair, accurate and considered account of an interesting life – interesting because, of course, there isn’t much point in reading about a life that was of no import, that was dull and boring. Courage is needed, and a quality of self-confidence, in one who presumes to give a full account of...
I liked John Montague immediately, for the exemplary quality of his poems but also for his endearing, mischievous, cosmopolitan personality. He was a breath of fresh air in Cork, then a rather narrow provincial city, bringing welcome intimations of a wider world which he was happy to share with a small coterie of young poets taking their first tentative steps into a world where he was already an established figure.

TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS

Uncanny Valley

One of the strangest things about our current moment is the seemingly abrupt right turn of the tech industry in support of the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. This is especially unsettling for Irish people, long used to being the affable middleman between a welcoming America and a more culturally inscrutable Europe. Those of us who see the pixels of their US colleagues on Zoom, Teams or Meet every day have often sympathised - even if silently - with the gloomier faces, while finding the unfettered glee of others harder to take. It is as if Biff Tannen’s cinematic politics...
Over the years, Yarvin’s radicalisation has developed into something akin to what 1930s English and German fascism would look like if filtered through a mesh of Internet memes marinated in 4chan. Yarvinism adopts the communication style of the post-modern, Internet era: multiple layers of irony, active conceptual contradictions, provocative statements issued then withdrawn with a knowing wink, then reissued with a slightly different phrasing – and underpinning it all, a kind of rustic sadism.

SECRETS

The Mysterious Alice Munro

In July 2024, three months after Alice Munro died, her daughter, Andrea Munro Skinner, published an essay in the Toronto Star, revealing that her mother’s husband and her own stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her when she was a child. Sixteen years after the abuse occurred Alice Munro was told of it. She decided to remain with Fremlin, with whom she had been living for seventeen years at that stage. In her essay, Andrea writes: I ... wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. I never wanted to see another... Alice Munro has been tried in the court of literary public opinion, and found guilty: of being selfish, of not being a good mother, of not accepting the moral standard of the present day. But perhaps the case is too complex for trial by public opinion. I do not think it facetious to suggest that the only form adequate to dealing with the issue is a story, a story written by a writer of the calibre of Munro herself.