Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Tales from Bective
Mary Lavin was not banned, but did she leave things out?
A Cold Literature
The writer, Chinese Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian insists, is not a prophet. He must tell the truth and articulate difference. The only criteria are aesthetic quality and truth to the emotions. “Cold literature” does not seek to change the world.
Frolicking in the Ether
Ciaran Perry’s second poetry collection has feel of a project wholly preconceived and systematically carried out, almost like a doctoral dissertation. Fortunately, he has knitted so skilfully that the sense of a systematic project pales, in the end, against the…
Making the Link, Breaking the Link
The common religious outlook of the English and Scots, albeit favouring different forms of Protestantism, produced conditions that were more favourable to political union than was the case in Ireland, where the majority continued to cling stubbornly to its Roman…
The Listener
The gifts that those who knew him would expect to encounter, intelligence, wit and playfulness, are in ample evidence in Dennis O’Driscoll’s posthumous prose collection, as is his conviction of the central importance of poetry and what it can do.
Governing in Hard Times
Ireland’s first independent government was faced with the ruinous cost of the Civil War, low levels of educational attainment and a tax base heavily eroded by emigration. While they could perhaps have done more to develop the economy, they succeeded…
Slim Pickings for the Soft Left
France has long been a beacon for social democrats but we may be looking at the beginning of the fall of social France. The political elites of right and left increasingly conform to Peter Mair’s idea of the cartel party,…
Cold War Reinvented
It is more than a little depressing to contemplate the possibility that the old cold war narrative which restricted the potential of so many individuals and peoples over the latter half of the twentieth century has given way to a…
The Lost Chief
The decision to abandon Parnell in the belief that sacrificing him would secure home rule lost Ireland a great leader and left in his place a myth of the tragic and romantic hero. Those who had made the decision overestimated…
Back in the GDR
Elizabeth Shaw, born in Belfast in 1920 to a bank manager father from Sligo, became a celebrated children’s author and book illustrator in postwar East Germany and a member of the state’s cultural elite. A primary school is named after…
From Salonika to Soloheadbeg
We may disagree over how best to commemorate the First World War, but we should recognise that it fundamentally changed Ireland, creating the conditions that made possible the revolutionary events of 1916 to 1923.
Captain Mighthavebeen
The mid-1960s saw a relaxation of old certainties among both communities in Northern Ireland. The unionist leader Terence O’Neill was conscious that it was necessary to offer some remedy to the discrimination that Catholics suffered, but even his mild measures…