Outlasting Fashion

The notions of rule and order that Richard Murphy inherited from his colonial administrator father have been put to different use by him in fashioning a body of poetic work that will endure.

Imagining the Others

An accessible crime thriller it may be, but John Banville’s most celebrated novel also marks out his singular intellectual ambition, an ambition that in the early 1970s Seamus Deane recognised as distinguishing him from all other young Irish writers.

Syria, Goodbye to Diversity

Authoritarian but relatively secularist regimes in the Middle East have often been protectors of diversity. If they are destroyed, where will the region's minorities go?

Total War

In the brutal conduct of its invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany revealed its true nature fully for the first time as all political, legal or moral scruples were cast aside.

Almost a Hoot

Charlotte Mendelson has abundant imagination and considerable comic gifts, but she would be well advised to pay more serious attention to the detail of her execution.

Rebel Cork

The first of a projected three-volume study of revolution and war in Cork City examines the period from the Easter Rising to the Armistice.

Kin and Kingship

A Middle Irish saga, second only in reputation to the Tain, has been republished in a new scholarly edition whose introduction brings out the work’s narrative artistry and coherence.