Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
THE BIG ONE
Though he fell out with the temper of the times in the later 1960s, in the light of history Bellow will be a judged a great American novelist, and Herzog, cerebral and earthy, imbued with two thousand years of learning…
The Goggle Box
Television has been accused of dumbing down the population almost since it was invented. For TS Eliot even the word itself was ugly and foreign. Noel Coward thought it ‘hideous and horrid’, while those on the left feared it would…
Hope in Guatemala
The overthrow of Árbenz in 1954 was among the most ill-conceived CIA operations. In the hypercharged atmosphere of the early cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower, secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, decided that…
John Bull Knows Best
A new biography of British liberal imperialist Thomas Macaulay, who made his mark on India as a young man, does not challenge the view that the liberalism he espoused was often only skin deep while the imperialism was all too…
The Light from the East
A new book demonstrates the longlasting and deep engagment of various Irish scholars and practitioners with the religious and cultural traditions of eastern Asia.
A Tiny Space of Little Importance
As most of Ireland seethes at the individuals who prospered while the country pitched over into a financial sump, Justin Quinn has composed a novel that not only asks us to sympathise with one of those wealthy figures but actually…
The Red and the Green
Ireland long had two parties competing for the favour of the Soviet Union. One was to remain tiny and irrelevant; the other found that its strategy of formulating ‘reformist demands in the mouth of a revolutionary party’ was not sustainable…
Beastly to the Hun
A new study of the origins of the First World War provides an engaging and skilful account but is perhaps a little too close to the perceptions of the victors and a little too ready to see only malice emanating…
Endgame
It is proper to retain some scepticism about the prevailing heroic narrative of the War of Independence, which was not without its unattractive features, but to claim that an armed campaign was unnecessary is to make an assertion for which…
Outlasting Fashion
The notions of rule and order that Richard Murphy inherited from his colonial administrator father have been put to different use by him in fashioning a body of poetic work that will endure.
Imagining the Others
An accessible crime thriller it may be, but John Banville’s most celebrated novel also marks out his singular intellectual ambition, an ambition that in the early 1970s Seamus Deane recognised as distinguishing him from all other young Irish writers.
The Road to Genocide
The ancient Christian communities of Syria, having survived the rise of Islam in the seventh century and the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth may be driven into the sea in the twenty-first.