Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Answering Luther
A superb and beautifully written study of the sixteenth century Council of Trent, when the Catholic church gathered to consider its response to Protestantism, constitutes a painless crash course on the Europe of the time.
No Pact With Progress
In 1974 the Limerick poet Michael Hartnett announced from the stage of a Dublin theatre that he would no longer write in English, a decision which, he informed the audience, gave him somewhere to stand.
Getting an Edge
Imagination, determination and an ability to exploit the commercial attractiveness to the consumer of the authentic and traditional have enabled many successful businesses to be created and sustained in peripheral locations in Ireland. Perhaps there is more than one viable…
Rich Folks’ Politics
As Wasps and similar types decline as a percentage of the US population, things don’t look great for the Republican party. But its creation of safe seats through gerrymandering has facilitated a takeover by extremists, against whom the traditional ‘country…
Ulysses and Africa
A new book seeks to consider writers’ responses to Homer from an anticolonial or postcolonialist perspective.
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.