Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Doesn’t Add Up
Modern states are awash with statistics. So it doesn’t take too long, for example, to work out that inequalities of wealth are at their greatest since the late nineteenth century.
A Place in the Sun
Catherine O’Flynn’s new novel, which focuses on two generations of a Birmingham-Irish family and their distinct and contrasting experiences of dislocation, manages to be consistently comic yet also sad and moving.
The Road to Partition
At times the Irish question in its final parliamentary phase resembles a vast deserted asylum whose last inhabitants are its historians, who begin to fear that having arrived as visitors they have become confined as inmates.
Big Picture History
A new study examines Ireland from medieval times in the context of social organisation, how surplus wealth is created and deployed, how literacy affects authority and how elites foster a supportive class between themselves and the masses.
Licking Death
Cancer is a serious business, and also big business, particularly in the US. But ‘declaring war’ on it is like declaring war on death. Our own Irish Cancer Society has launched a ‘strategy statement’ that envisages a ‘future without cancer’,…
The Joke’s the Thing
Joseph Heller’s great novel is indeed a satire, not just on war but on McCarthyism and bureaucracy. But above all it is absurd –a sugar-coated pill to cope with the joke of war and the joke of life and a…
The Work of Giants
The architectural profession, peacock-like, has sprung to the fore in modern Ireland. But in Victorian Ireland the heroes were the engineers, and justifiably so.
What’s funny?
There have been many attempts to define the essence of humour but it seems to be a little too complex and wide-ranging to be captured by any single theory.
Where we are
We are, somewhat unsurprisingly, where we are. But how did we get there? And does our constitution have anything to do with it? It can be argued that the 1937 assemblage of principles has served us well. But who exactly…
Evil Literature
A new survey deals with literature and sexuality in Ireland from Joyce to McGahern, taking in the background of shrill clerical warnings of moral dangers and occasions of sin and a more humane and well-intentioned, if much mocked, strain of…
Beyond Belief
Gabriel García Márquez emerged explosively as a new international name in the 1960s with a novel stuffed with the baroque and the fantastic, which sought to translate the scope of America.
Neighbours
Germany and Russia have had a relationship over the centuries that has more often been businesslike than hostile. The business being conducted, however, and the deals that have been struck, have seldom much benefited the countries in between.