Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Looking Into The Dark
Yet it is quite inadequate to approach child abuse as a sin; it is a compulsive behaviour, it harms children, and it is a crime. For those who see child abuse as a sin, repentance and absolution might wipe the…
Violent Remedies
The same year Rodrigo Borgia, one of the most controversial of the many controversial Renaissance popes, became Pope Alexander VI. As Unger notes, he “was on intimate terms with … Greed, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, and Pride”. He was widely reported…
Between Worlds
Burnside’s poems inhabit places at the shifting and hazy intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, a zone where the dead “have more friends than the living”. Their aura of quiet fragility and gentleness can be deceiving; there is no…
Much The Same
Nonetheless, as letter after letter testifies, for Beckett “the essential doesn’t change” and a deeply ingrained pessimism, tempered by sympathy and loyalty, pervades these pages, as one would perhaps expect it to.
Blood Relations
Murray’s attitude is, at times, one of barely concealed impatience with the Freudian and other theoretical perspectives which have been brought to bear on his subject. This is a stance which can yield useful correctives, as when he protests against…
Getting By
Jacques Rivière claimed that great writers could not be great moral characters, because their necessarily self-centred natures made them poorly equipped for devotion and sacrifice, and since they had to distance themselves from their feelings in order to see them,…
The Last Thing She Wanted
Didion’s sensibility has roots in sixties drift and New Journalism iconoclasm, but refracted through a conservative temperament, not unlike the satirical streak of her contemporary Tom Wolfe, that is partly an expression of her origins: Episcopalian, California old money, daughter…
The Great Unloved
Many claim that Ahern was constrained by the desire of the PDs and liberal ministers in his Cabinet to cut back the state. This misses the point that the social partners, including the unions, were central to the call for…
Sifting And Winnowing
Many self-proclaimed radicals choose to exercise their freedom in order to tell students what to think, rather than take the slower, truly academic (and ultimately more subversive) path of teaching them how to think. As such they bear an uncanny…
Belonging And Becoming
It would seem that it was in Beckett that he found the literary model for a kind of narrative based on a deconstruction of received knowledge, on doubt as an instrument of style that could be inserted into an historical…
Picking At It
Critics of his revisions, Yeats wrote, needed to grasp “what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake”, but self-reinvention is one thing and tinkering for tinkering’s sake another, the low-level molestation of poems to no discernible…
Documents of a Spiritual Resistance
Of the love poems, the two outstanding examples are by an archbishop of Tuam, Maol Mhuire Ó hUigín. One is addressed to a young man called Eoghan, but the point is to warn this youth not to fall in love…