Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Hair of the Dog?
Europe is a conglomeration of different economic models, whose various recessions have been provoked by disparate causes requiring distinct remedies. As in a hospital ward where one patient suffers from a broken leg, another gout and another cancer, a common…
The Snug Opaque Quotidian
Some critics thought John Updike ‘a minor novelist with a major style’, a misjudgement which may be based on a doctrinaire rejection of the suburban middle class life which was his material and which he represented in all its fullness…
Hostage to Fortune
Brendan Behan’s brief, self-destructive moment in the American spotlight is a cautionary tale of excess. But we should also ask in whose interest was the myth of the man created? And what need did the wild Irishman fulfil for the…
Living through Extermination
The concentration camps were extermination camps: when prisoners were not immediately murdered, they were subjected to a regime few could long survive. Yet this is not so unprecedented in human history. Eighteenth century slaves were not only routinely subjected to…
One Onion, Many Layers
Irish Catholic social elites, emerging confidently after the ebb of British anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century, increasingly sent their children to schools, both in England and in Ireland, created on the public school model. There some of them learned that…
But I Live in Dublin
The Dublin Notebook, appearing as the seventh volume in OUP’s collected Hopkins, is an exemplary work of scholarship and from now any serious piece of writing about the last phase of Hopkins’s life will rely on and be grateful for…
New Poems
These four new poems by Gerald Dawe are from Mickey Finn’s Air, to be published later this year by Gallery Press
Is the Pope a Communist?
Some people are impressed by the apparent humility of Pope Francis and his objections to market capitalism. But should the left regard him as an ally or is socialism not more about production and plenty than simplicity and austerity?
Britain and Ireland Begin
Two studies of early British history and prehistory and of a roughly equivalent period in Ireland leave the reader in no doubt as to how closely interrelated the two countries are, and indeed have been from time immemorial.
Turn Down That Racket
Mike Goldsmith’s engaging grand tour of the world of noise takes us from the (silent) “Big Bang” and the general quiet of pre-historic times to contemporary problems of noise pollution. An enjoyable read, full of insight and wit, it is…
The Insurrectionist
1916 leader Sean Mac Diarmada despised Ireland’s involvement in the British parliamentary tradition. He believed that an uprising, and the likely self-sacrifice of its leaders, would lead Ireland to independent nationhood.
Casting a Spell
The older I get, John Burnside remarks, the happier my childhood gets. In a third volume of memoirs he goes further towards an understanding of his father, a threatening alcoholic for whom, he had said in an earlier book, cruelty…