Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
DUBLIN AT WAR
There has been no collective amnesia in Ireland about the Great War. The event was remembered in Dublin for many decades after it ended, but in terms appropriate to the city’s experience of it.
LETTER FROM PHILADELPHIA
The Republicans are an alliance of the super-rich and degree-less whites, topped with an upper crust of hypercapitalists, a misalliance cemented by pan-Protestant evangelism.
THINKING SHORT
A fixation on short term gain led to our economic collapse. Now it’s time to focus on the real economy, where the fundamentals are still sound.
THE HOUSE OF CARDS
László Krasznahorkai’s novels are balanced between a precarious inertia and total collapse. The animating tension of his work resides not, as is the case in more conventional novels, in questions of who did what or what happens next, but in…
Nurse of the Infant Nation
Alice Milligan, political activist and feminist and the first architect of Ireland’s national theatre movement, died in poverty and was largely forgotten by later generations.
States and Nations
Yet differences also stand out. In Northern Ireland Catholic political disaffection was reinforced by material inequality. Protestant alienation from the southern state’s Catholic ethos was mitigated by a relatively strong position in commercial and professional life.
The Trials of Ulysses
John Butler Yeats recognised in Joyce “an intense feeling for what is actual and true” and saw that “[t]he whole movement against Joyce and his terrible veracity, naked and unashamed, has its origin in the desire of people to live…
An Inch From The Everyday
Ford’s narrators get into our ears. A master of first person narrative, he creates observers who are lyrical and philosophical yet confused; situated outside the principal action but profoundly affected by it; urged on by a desire for engagement with…
Having a Wonderful Time
Hemingway himself describes the events to his family several weeks later, although in retrospect he would admit not remembering what had happened: “The 227 wounds I got from the trench mortar didn’t hurt a bit at the time, only my…
Getting To The Triangle
Citing mostly late nineteenth century and early/mid-twentieth century clinicians, he argues that there are only three mutually exclusive pathological mental structures: neurosis, psychosis and perversion. The difference between neurosis and psychosis lies in the degree of certainty with which beliefs…
Fighting With Shadows
This equation of the county with mindless violence and chaos has long since been forgotten, and Tipperary has become one of the most respectable of Irish counties, because qualities which Victorian commentators asserted were intrinsic to the Irish character were…
The Truth Teller
Casement’s achievement was to observe and to testify, proving that the gross myths and exaggerations reaching Europe about these places were not gross myths and exaggerations at all. There is some irony in that. The cruelty which this novel underlines…