Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
When Not To Listen
Sinéad Morrissey has written of how she learned from the Welsh poet RS Thomas how to ignore, when necessary, a hostile environment and the play of literary fashions: half the battle is knowing what not to listen to.
Defying Big Brother
In the decades following the end of the Second World War, western Europe experienced the greatest long boom the world has ever known. This period of prosperity and security was not based on the rickety notion of “anti-fascism” but rather…
American Berserk
Philip Roth’s American Pastoral can be seen as the start of his most prolific period, when he turned to focus more on questions of assimilation and social mobility in a country John F Kennedy called “a nation of immigrants”.
The Death of a Language
When does a language begin to die? When children raised to speak it struggle to acquire a native-speaker level, and therefore the “language community” fails to regenerate itself linguistically, Joe Mac Donnacha argues. According to that definition, the evidence suggests…
HAVE A NICE DAY, DAY, DAY …
Fast food workers in the States don’t earn enough to eat … fast food. Too bad, say the employers, what they do can easily be done by machines.
The Grace of Accuracy
Jason Sommer’s fourth poetry collection exhibits a master’s command of language, rhythm, and image, a formidable narrative gift and an unflinching willingness to take on themes that are both intensely personal and expansively historical.
Words At Will
To get into the best English society, Oscar Wilde thought, one must either feed people or shock people. And so, while they fed him, he shocked them with his wit and insolence. And yet he managed for the most part…
Gianni in Buncrana
He came from out foreign and he spoke wild funny. All the older girls thought he was the last word from the day and hour they set eyes on him but they were stupid, and he would no more look…
Demonic Ideologist
The popular historian James Anthony Froude believed that superior strength was as a rule a sign of superior merit, held Irishmen in particularly low esteem and offered Oliver Cromwell as the model for how a superior race should govern a…
That Kind of Beauty
It is difficult to define the picturesque, and yet it is a term commonly associated with the Irish landscape. What makes one site or location a more worthy attraction than another may seem arbitrary, but there is a religious and…
Democracy’s Sphinx
A new study of Alexis de Tocqueville emphasises his French intellectual background and makes the case that his classic analysis of American democracy may be understood as well, or even better, if it is considered primarily in terms of the…
All in the Mix
Inspired by atomistic science, thinkers in early modern England, including John Locke, developed a conceptual framework whereby it is the mixture of parts, unregulated by any superior form, which constitutes both the natural world and the body politic.