Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Hiss! Boo! Take it off!
The noisy censure of a dramatic performance must, in legal principle, be the expression of the feelings of the moment. If it is premeditated ‘by a number of persons confederated beforehand’ it becomes criminal. Such was the background to the…
A Different Kind of Nothing
Paul Murray’s new novel is fiendishly clever, loosely yet convincingly plotted, as brash and vulgar at times as the world it portrays. It is wild, playful, baggy, perverse, exaggerated, carnivalesque; but it is endlessly engaging, riotously funny and devastatingly serious.
Boomtime Rot
Dermot Bolger knows his characters, knows the schools they went to in the 1970s, the kind of parents they had, the parents’ world of the 1940s. But he also knows their teenage children born in the 90s, the slang they…
Prose with Skirts
The painter and sculptor Brian O’Doherty’s most recent novel, based on the life of an actually existing eighteenth century French diplomat, stands with the very greatest historical fiction. It is also a profound meditation on the nature of fetishism and…
A Dance You Should Know
In the era of Brendan Bowyer, Dickie Rock and Joe Dolan, Ireland was showband-crazy. The performances may not always have been of high quality but the bands provided musicians with a living and audiences with previously unimaginable levels of glamour…
A Different Furrow
Much twentieth century Irish poetry is seen as a reaction against or a coming to terms with the influence of Yeats. Brian Coffey, however, a friend of Beckett and Joyce whose early influences were Eliot, Pound and the Symbolists, wrote…
Irish Visionaries
A collection of essays on figures drawn from five centuries, from William Petty to Fintan O’Toole, who set themselves to think about Ireland is vigorous in its argument and confident in its provision of intellectual armour for future discussions about…
Working With What’s Left
Clearly Catholicism can never recover its former dominance in Ireland, a dominance which was itself an historical aberration. But if it is forced to live as a religious remnant community, as has happened in many other places, therein might lie…
The Turn of the Wheel
The story of John Redmond’s final rise and fall is by no means an easy one to tell, but a new study has given shrewd consideration to how it should be done and provides an impressively detached account of the…
Love Is All You Need
‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ The writings of Julian of Norwich communicate an urgent message of hope and love and stand among the finest literary achievements of the…
Scripts and Prescriptions
An inspiring new collection of essays by a doctor and literary scholar affirms Beckett’s intuition that it is ‘the occasional glimpse’ of mutual recognition ‘by us in them and … by them in us of that smile at the human…
Tell It Like It Is
During the years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the media, and particularly BBC television, came under pressure to assist the state’s war against armed revolt rather than fulfilling its duty to be impartial and to inform. For the most…