Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
That’ll All have to go
It’s a wonder any of Georgian Dublin survived at all given how many enemies it had, from government ministers bearing historic resentments to state companies wishing to make a mark, speculative property developers in cahoots with party fundraisers, dangerous buildings…
Crimes and Punishment
Germans have confronted the crimes of the Nazi regime with honesty and thoroughness. Important sections of Japanese society, however, prefer to forget or forgive the wartime actions of their army and deal with victim nations with defiance, not conciliation.
Lost in the Funhouse
Nabokov’s masterpiece still occasionally has to be defended against the charge that it uses a high-art modernist veneer to excuse pornographic pleasures. In fact it is a complex, convoluted literary puzzle, a hall of mirrors where moral viewpoint is elusive,…
Syria, Goodbye to Diversity
Authoritarian but relatively secularist regimes in the Middle East have often been protectors of diversity. If they are destroyed, where will the region’s minorities go?
Total War
In the brutal conduct of its invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany revealed its true nature fully for the first time as all political, legal or moral scruples were cast aside.
Almost a Hoot
Charlotte Mendelson has abundant imagination and considerable comic gifts, but she would be well advised to pay more serious attention to the detail of her execution.
Rebel Cork
The first of a projected three-volume study of revolution and war in Cork City examines the period from the Easter Rising to the Armistice.
Kin and Kingship
A Middle Irish saga, second only in reputation to the Tain, has been republished in a new scholarly edition whose introduction brings out the work’s narrative artistry and coherence.
Side Views of the Self
Like another smart New Jersey Jewish boy, Philip Roth, Paul Auster has rendered the texture of American life through reportage, but he is somewhat set apart from the Jewish-American literary milieu by the influence of Beckett and the French poetic…
Words and Glances
Henry James’s great novel, with its melding of the social and psychological aspects of character, represented a broad bridge connecting the societal narratives mastered by Austen, Dickens and Eliot and the Modernist canon of the twentieth century.
The day the ATM broke
The most dispiriting aspect of our economic crisis five years on has been the absence of the political courage needed to implement the radical political, economic and administrative reforms that would make Ireland competitive in the way that other small…
The Old Boot Resouled
The Innti generation of Irish-language writers recast poetry for a new generation of urban dwellers and imbued it with the revolutionary and liberating sentiments of the time.