Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Bohemian Rhapsodist
Walter Starkie was an enthusiast for Gypsy music and culture, a professor of Romance languages, a director of the Abbey Theatre, an accomplished violinist, a literary translator and a harbourer of the hope that Ireland might experience a spiritual awakening…
The Black Diaries: the Case for Forgery
In spite of television documentary investigations proclaiming the notorious Black Diaries of Roger Casement to have been solely his own work, there is still an excellent case to be made that they are forgeries, based on erasures and interpolations, designed…
Easy Does It
Angela Merkel’s style, which is based on caution, analysis and calm calculation married with a commitment to tolerance in the public sphere, has seen her win three successive election victories. Will she be able to add political imagination to these…
Discovering Shan Bullock
Patrick Maume illustrates this overlooked author’s contribution to Irish literary fiction, focusing on how Bullock’s own childhood and relationship with his father was integral to his depiction of small farming society in the borderlands of South Ulster.
Punished for being Poor
It is clear that no real effort was made by the Irish government to seriously consider alternatives to the strategy of institutionalisation developed in the nineteenth century. Adoption was illegal until 1952 and boarding out was resisted on the religious…
The Big Cabbage
In the original Chandler novels, mansions, money and manicured lawns did not necessarily presage either virtue or happiness. In Black-Banville’s remake we seem to have taken cognisance of what has happened in the interim, with a Philip Marlowe who strangely…
The Last Post
Animals have been divided into those we watch TV with, those we eat and those we’re scared of. If ‘becoming animal’ is understood in Hiberno-English as an unfortunate consequence of excessive alcohol consumption, here it is rather a way of…
On the Necessary Execution of a Prince
Was the recent arrest, trial and execution of North Korea’s number two politician just another sign of the madness of the regime? Or was it perhaps a sign to the people that things could actually change for the better and…
Recovering Princes, Respected Prelates, Reduced Poets
There appears to be some repressive force, almost an enchantment, affecting academic thinking. The experts cannot or will not suspect, let alone address, the crucial position of poets in Gaelic civilisation and in Ireland’s enigmatic history.
Loyal Servant
Roger Casement understood that in his official duties he was serving not just a British king but the king of Ireland. If there were then betrayals within the United Kingdom it was England which first betrayed Ireland.
Warts And All
LBJ, the man the baby boomer generation loved to hate, was, even one of his political enemies has admitted, ‘for all his towering ego, his devastating instinct for the weakness of others, his unlimited capacity for self-pity … a man…
Comrades in Death
In the 1920s many republican leaders insisted that they did not object to the commemoration of the WWI dead but to the jingoism and glorification of imperialism that accompanied it, like the ostentatiously offensive behaviour of Trinity College students and…