Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
A Larkinite In Power
Frank Cluskey had some very considerable achievements to his credit as a Labour Party minister in coalition governments, but he found himself at odds with many in his party, in particular over attitudes to the violence that was then beginning…
Held By The Roots
Gerard Smyth is a poet strongly associated with his native Dublin, and in particular with the period of his childhood and youth. His new collection is marked by an impulse to record, with piety and fidelity. The tone is elegiac,…
Body And Soul
Ta Nehisi Coates contends that white supremacy is a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. Marilynne Robinson argues that moral revival, though its results are never enough, is also central to…
Mind Games
Oppressed by his inability to write and seeking an intense experience, John Lennon sets out, accompanied by his wise and unflappable native guide, Cornelius O’Grady, on a journey westward to Clew Bay in Kevin Barry’s brilliant, virtuoso, boundary-breaking new novel.
The Long Conversation
We should neither heroise nor demonise the Romans, writes leading classicist Mary Beard, but we should take them seriously and not close down our long conversation with their legacy. But has that legacy been everywhere and always the same one?
Communities At War
It might be expected that World War II’s impact in Northern Ireland would be determined by sectarian criteria, with unionists relishing the opportunity to prove their loyalty and nationalists stubbornly withholding their support. In reality things were more complex.
Lord of the Flies
Jerry Coyne’s shouty polemic against religion, and against the possibility of any accommodation between science and religious belief, is largely an attack on creationism and ‘ìntelligent design’. It is hard to see it being taken seriously anywhere but in the…
The Polish Rising
In August 1944, Germany was retreating before the Red Army while in the west the liberation of France had begun. Polish patriots thought the time was right to launch an uprising in Warsaw, but the action proved to be a…
The Commemoration Trap
All political parties cannibalise the past selectively for facts and arguments deemed useful to safeguarding and advancing their future fortunes. This is normal and to be expected. But what is produced in this way is not history, which is a…
The Big World Spins
Ireland in the revolutionary and Civil War years seemed to be much taken up with its own affairs. But Dubliners flocked to a lavish new picture palace, attended a world title fight and, in spite of warnings of the moral…
England Unfree
A novel written entirely in an archaic version of English and without the benefit of punctuation evokes the world of the Saxons overwhelmed by the sudden and brutal invasion of the Normans in the late eleventh century. It has been…
What Next?
Justin Quinn is fascinated by the inevitability that rhyme suggests: as one rhyme brings on another, so we are born, produce other lives, and die. Generation follows generation in a process that has fascinated Quinn since he wrote of the…