Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
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.
Birds, beasts and flowers
DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind of opinionated prickliness when things are not what they seem to be or should be.
The Stilled World
Unsentimental, sparing and unspecific, the painter Patrick Pye has sought figurative images to represent symbolically “the archetypes of our humanity” depicted in an alternative universe where expiation has been achieved.
The Curator of Chiaroscuro
Sebastião Salgado’s latest book of photographs represents nature more as a New Age dream of harmony rather than the random mayhem and violent contingency it actually is.
Brave Answers
A new collection casts further light on the clergyman-poet RS Thomas and his two great subjects, God and Wales
The Empathy Man
Finishing a novel for Colum McCann feels like finishing a PhD. He upends the traditional maxim to “write what you know” in favour of writing “what you want to know”.
The Meaning of Ryanair
Orwell got it wrong. It is not governments but banks, insurance companies, pension funds and low-cost airlines, the raucous cheerleaders of deregulation, that oppress and stupefy us with a network of small and baffling rules.
The Gentleman Naturalist
Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution have weathered well and he cannot be held responsible for those who have developed a repugnant politics on the back of a vulgarisation of them.