Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Do You Believe In Magic?
The truth is never pure and rarely simple, and in Macbeth fair is foul and foul is fair.
THE END OF DAYS
Barbara Kingsolver presents a story of American rural life in which ecological concern is balanced with a fine feeling for the texture of actual lives.
HEADS STUCK IN A BOOK
A woman reading is in a world of her own, not in the world of others managing or nurturing, where some think she belongs.
FIGHTING CORRUPTION
Developed Western states have a multitude of interests in Africa and the Middle East and balancing human rights concerns with other economic, ecological and political interests will never be easy.
It’s Diston Wot Done It
Like Evelyn Waugh, Amis knows how to sharpen his comedy by a deadpan delivery. Like Waugh too, he is adept at pressing the narrative towards the monstrous, surreal and grotesque while remaining just on this side of the border between…
LITERATURE IS ALWAYS NOW
The idea of retreat or retrenchment might surprise those who see nothing but good in the present, with its ceaselessly productive creative arts, but Derek Mahon wants nothing to do with this cheerful complacency.
Lying for France
Reluctance to admit the innocence of the unjustly condemned Captain Dreyfus arose not just from anti-Semitism but against a background of bitter century-old divisions.
Island Sickness
Long divided, Argentines finally found national unity under the leadership of the continent’s most murderous regime and its campaign to retake the Malvinas.
AN IMPERIAL MEDIEVALIST
A collection of essays pays timely tribute to one of the greatest scholars that Ireland has ever produced.
The Inside Man
An unorthodox, non-doctrinaire leftist, Gore Vidal tended to make would-be political allies uncomfortable and was not an easy individual with whom to make common cause.
NAUGHTY BUT NICE
Jane Austen inherited a tradition in which the novel was expected to teach good behaviour. But that was not what interested her. Her fictions are less moral examples than celebrations of wit and intelligence.
ADDLED BY BOOKS
Enrique Vila-Matas plays some complex games with literature and characters yet any threat of heaviness is redeemed by his assured comic touch and fine sense of the ridiculous.