Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Bands of Brothers
The Third International, or Comintern, maintained for many years a vast international organisation none of its left-wing rivals could match. When the purges came in the 1930s, however, its members suffered to a proportionately greater extent than any other category.
The Disappearing Priest
Seminarians were traditionally taught to view the body with suspicion, as a source of temptation and sin. By embracing celibacy, many priests believed they were distinguishing themselves from ordinary men and women, that they were in some way superior to…
Old Europe, Aging America
Two recent works of literary theory sketch a robust structural account of the literary world system centred on London and Paris. But one might ask if this system can be better historicised and whether there are ways to conceive of…
Friends At War
Was the Irish Civil War really a struggle between social classes?
Representing Disaster
Responding to traumatic events remains one of art’s most problematic undertakings. Horrific events are often beyond articulation and this sense of inadequacy is enhanced when the creative work, with its overtones of pleasure and even whimsy, enters the fray.
A Catastrophe Not Foreseen
Russia’s handling of its client Serbia in the run-up to the First World War was an object lesson in how not to do it. While it is a mistake to assign exclusive culpability for the outbreak of the war to…
A Massacre of Art?
A stimulating new study, focusing on one painting and its contemporary critical reception, illuminates the French painter Eugène Delacroix, a man who, ‘reactionary in his ideas, romantic in his talent’, was, according to Victor Hugo, in contradiction with his own…
It’s That Man Again
Banville’s heroes are by now familiar to us. Remote, middle-aged elitist types, tortured by the burden of existence and the shadow of death, they may not be hugely wealthy but are never poor. Often they are on the margins of…
Lost Connections
Most groups wrongfooted by the advent of Irish independence in the 1920s have since made their peace with it: the state’s Protestant minority, Trinity College, even diehard republicans. But the Jesuit order, it seems, is still dragging its feet and…
A Leap Into Darkness
Literary quality, Robert Bolaño said, was not just about writing well, because anybody can do that, or even writing marvellously well: anybody can do that too. It was about knowing how to thrust your head into the darkness and understanding…
Struggling for Sanctity
A biographer of Ernest Hemingway has argued that his life can be read in terms of a quest for sainthood, a struggle to be not just a good writer but also a good man. A blow by blow account of…
Not All Fool
Mervyn Wall’s satires are in a playful and sometimes whimsical tradition which resists the uplift of the gods and heroes phase of the Irish revival and which includes many of the works of James Stephens and, at a pinch, Flann…