Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Street Smart
Lyrics have been defined as short poems written to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, but should Paul Muldoon’s lyrics be judged primarily as poems or as songs?
The Wild Harvest
Before the inexorable advance of the conifer, the picking of wild berries on Irish hillsides often provided a welcome seasonal boost in income for poorer rural families.
Sacred Egoist
The Italian critic and editor Roberto Calasso enjoys a considerable reputation among the literary-critical elite, but how much substance or originality is there in his anti-rational musings?
A Moralist in the Newsroom
As well as being a novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus was, at various times of his life, a journalist, working as reporter, editor and columnist. It was a profession about which he held very strong views.
Not telling
Edna O’Brien’s memoir refuses to satisfy our curiosity or submit to the demands for interpretation. She has fought others’ desire for control from childhood, and in her eighties is still fighting.
Restless Eric
Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the most respected of twentieth century historians, still manages to impress from beyond the grave with a wide-ranging tour of culture and society.
A Jig in the Poorhouse
A quarter of a century ago it was stated that no serious academic historian takes seriously any more the claim of genocide in relation to Britain’s role in the Famine. It may be time to debate that assertion again.
The Big D
Christopher Hitchens enlists science in the face of death
Neglected Children
The collection of early children’s books bequeathed to Trinity College library by the late Mary Pollard is an invaluable resource but its value to scholars is being diminished by cuts in funding, cuts which indeed affect the entire library sector…
Three Presences
Yeats, Eliot and Pound were the three dominant figures in the remaking of early twentieth century English poetry. Though they managed to maintain friendships, each of them was, to a significant degree, deaf to rhythms other than their own.
A Famine Document
In April 1847 a vessel departed from Charlestown naval yard with eight hundred tons of relief supplies for the people of the city and county of Cork, paid for by the people of Boston and other towns in Massachusetts.
The Inishowen Oracle
John Toland, born into Gaelic-speaking north Donegal in the late seventeenth century, became an important controversialist, deist, pantheist and passionate anti-cleric.