Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
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…
Airborne
‘The Airship Era’ one of O’Reilly’s most finely achieved poems, explores the moment in which modern technology meets the legacy of symbolic traditional cultures. In the figure of the Zeppelin the future is untethered from the earth as air and…
After The Glory
Irishmen who served with the British army in the First World War are now almost routinely portrayed as forgotten victims, a marginalised group living in a condition of semi-boycott. A thorough analysis of their conditions of life in succeeding decades…
Boza Calling
Orhan Pamuk is a writer whose life and work are held aloft as emblematic of his country’s wishes and woes. In his new novel, Pamuk suggests that tradition in the public sphere need not be dangerous