Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Freedom Smells Like French Perfume
Many feminists abhor Femen for its naked protests and apparent acceptance of conventional or trashy ideas of beauty, but there is also a more basic clash at work here between a direct confrontation with injustice and a new feminism which…
Response
A letter from Bill Kautt in response to a recent review of his book: Ground Truths: British Army Operations in the Irish War of Independence.
Teaching the Natives a Lesson
By the end of the Ethiopian campaign in May 1936, the Royal Italian Air force had deployed more than three hundred tons of arsenic, phosgene and mustard gas. Fascist Italy was thus the first European state after World War I…
Muddling Through
The surface noise of democratic politics can make leaders slow to recognise a crisis. The knowledge that previous crises have been overcome encourages delay; delay encourages drift; fear of drift encourages precipitate action; precipitate action encourages mistakes; mistakes encourage caution….
The French Connections
Two new books of essays, one in English and one in French, and a study of Charles de Gaulle’s Irish antecedents reveal the many links, political, historical, cultural and artistic, between ourselves and our next-nearest neighbours.
History: Discipline or Instrument?
Was professional history, based on dispassionate sifting and analysis of evidence, replaced after the 1960s in response to the developing Troubles by a public history more interested in reception than in method, which saw historians take on the role of…
Spies and Gentlemen
A new book focusing on Kim Philby, the Cambridge spies and the rivalry between MI5 and its more upper class sister service, MI6, argues that an astute Russian policy of penetration and the loyalties embedded in the class system combined…
Ahead of the Curve
The Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis believed that art best serves human personality by being impersonal, by affirming space and the full maturity of the object, fixity, against the fleeting moment, the accidental by-products of a process.
The Shining River
A chapter-length extract from Kevin Stevens’s new novel, an urban crime drama about money, race, and class set in Kansas City in the 1930s.
Plunkett’s City
Walks through Dublin’s streets and slums, and through the leafy avenues of the airy and salubrious suburb of Kingstown, punctuate James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, casting light on the social divisions of the city and the political tensions which, as the…
This Life a Long Disease
Some recent writers have strongly emphasised the morbidity of Jonathan Swift’s temper, but a new biography restores some balance, putting the Dean’s apparent savagery into the context of his century and equally emphasising his huge gifts and the glamour and…
Snap, Crackle and Pop
Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music is the latest evidence of the writer’s ability to create rich characters and stories in whichever historical context she chooses. But do the historical research and narrative brio sometimes come at the expense of deeper introspection…