Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Keeping It Together
Belgium was saved from disintegration in the immediate postwar period by the pragmatism and farsightedness of its centrist political parties and their leaders. Do its politicians still retain those qualities?
A Single Volume Bound by Love
Clive James’s new Dante is the highly effective work of a poet who has absorbed tradition, who is aware of the demands of form, whose translations are imaginative and whose scholarship is immaculate.
Selective Memories
In the business of commemoration tensions are to be expected between the practices of the academy, the demands of the state and the expectations of individuals and groups on how each and every significant date is marked, or not marked.
The Lion and the Haunted House
Derryman Alec Foster was a great rugby player, a noted traditional singer and a highly regarded teacher, a left-wing republican and a founding member of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. He was also connected to a troublesome ghost.
Though the Sky Fall
When the legal forms and procedures of the state prove impotent, sometimes there is no recourse but to denunciation, if justice is to be done. But as Veronica Guerin found out, such courageous action can be costly.
Getting to Grey
Bipolar disorder has been explained as an attempt to create a world in which everything is either black or white. The illness can only be treated, it is suggested, when the important third element is introduced.
All the Known World
Many critics focus on James Salter’s stylistic precision and love of detail as if he is all surface. In fact, his art ushers us towards a larger view, an understanding of American character that is rooted in history.
Does Europe Exist?
Does culture reside only in particular nations and national traditions or can we speak of a European culture? And if we can, what might it be and how can we best preserve it?
Astonished at Everything
Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short spaces.
Varieties of Modernity
Relations between capitalism and the state have been crucial in Europe. Both, accommodating to claim-making from civil society, gave this model a distinctive concern with social solidarity.
The Writing Cure
Ross Skelton’s memoir of his Antrim childhood and his unhappy relationship with his father casts light on some of the hidden complexities of Ulster society in the middle of the last century and is likely to prove a work of…
Staring Down the Barrel
Some critics have found the protagonist of Claire Messud’s new novel unlikeable, which is not just absurd but ironic, given that the novel’s premise is society’s expectations of women’s behaviour.