Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Barbarians Strike
The so-called Night of the Broken Glass, which the Hitler government represented as a spontaneous irruption of anger, was a cynical and carefully choreographed attack on Germany’s Jewish population with the aim of demoralising them and despoiling them of their…
They fly so high … They fade and die
As we try to recover from the bubble and bust we might ask whether we as a nation take more risks than others, or to what extent gambling is an entrenched characteristic of the Irish.
‘A Full Life, A Good End’
Whatever about questions of mandate or democratic legitimacy, the bravery of the insurgents who fought in 1916, and of those who were executed for their role as leaders of the Rising, is beyond dispute.
Can an Intellectual be a Saint?
Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, is best seen not as a renegade liberal but as a sympathiser with a very different movement, which sought to break the grip of Thomism and return to the early sources of the Church.
Madwomen in the Attic
A novelistic exploration of Miss Havisham before Dickens got hold of her irresistibly recalls Jean Rhys’s brilliant work in the classic prequel genre.
Exuberantly Pluralist
George O’Brien’s impressive survey of fifty years of the Irish novel is inclusive, eclectic and insistently diverse.
Soundtrack to the Century
For fifty years, Duke Ellington was America’s most important and innovative musical figure, achieving distinction as a composer, arranger, songwriter, bandleader and pianist, and writing and producing timeless music of every kind.
Dispatches from the Island
Jonathan Franzen inextricably links writing to survival, to that which sustains life and keeps boredom and demise at bay.
As Fresh as a Cliché
We strive for originality, but perhaps old phrases should, like Mae West’s discarded lovers, be given a new chance with someone else.
Celebrating Uncertainty
What emerges clearly is a sense of Friel’s international importance. A chapter comparing him to Osborne and Storey liberates his plays from some of the confines that Irish scholarship restricts him to, showing clearly the universal significance of his work.
Just Make Do
With the slow death of God and religion, and the unsatisfactory nature of philosophy or what postmodernists call grand narratives, the beauty and pleasure of everyday life may be the only thing people can hold onto.
Labour Waits
Irish socialism was divided and weak in the early decades of the twentieth century, while the axis of trade union solidarity ran through Dublin and Merseyside, not Dublin, Belfast and Cork.