Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Badfellas
It is important to distinguish the harms intrinsically connected to drug use from the many harms in addition to the creation of a lucrative criminal black market in drugs that are actually caused by prohibition. Prohibition-induced ignorance, confusion and rashness…
One Part Prescient, Five Parts Puerile
Highly promiscuous, he was unfaithful to all his women, and never – quite – managed to love anyone else as much as he loved himself. He was chauvinistic and seemed to have very little respect for women – Rebecca West…
Different Because Worse
A political response that would disengage from the demands of financial markets that are by definition volatile and oriented towards short-term profit is urgently needed from EU leaders. Their historical failure to react decisively, with clarity as well as vision,…
The Art of Concealment
Gaps in personal biography are more than compensated for by O’Sullivan’s reassembly of the social and political networks inhabited by the O’Kelly brothers which, in their early years in Dublin and London, included John Devoy, James Clancy and Joe Clarke….
Edging Towards Peace
Although Mrs Thatcher professes to have found Mr Haughey easier to deal with than Dr FitzGerald, at the time … she had a high regard for his honesty of purpose and indeed (so it seemed to me) even a degree…
Our Man in Bohemia
His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part,…
The Sea of Anecdotes
While this merriment was afoot, I lay on my bunk straining to understand, and to be admitted to some small share of the pleasure which the rest of the company evidently derived from the recitals. At first the rapid flow…
A Gift of Tongues
With so little available for the general reader on Irish literary culture between 600 and 1600, in either Irish or English, we have to wonder at the failure of most of the few dozen relevant academic Columbuses to report back…
The Big Splatter
What is truly dazzling in Heaney is his descriptive power, his almost hymn to a Conway Stewart fountain pen, or glimpses of his father performing a farmyard task, wrought to a hallucinatory, Van Gogh-like intensity. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus…
Genius For Erasure
Cary Grant’s raised eyebrows were admittedly an awesome spectacle, but you wonder how they might have been harnessed to hasten the building of the Hoover Dam. At least in the 1930s they had Cary Grant. We have Lady Gaga.
Or So I Was Told
Poland is making rapid strides in catching up on the West but there remain areas where there is still much progress to be made. For example, it is perfectly possible – accepted even – for twenty-eight-year-old footballers to have no…
The Dub Republic
Doyle’s fusion of realism and ironic playfulness produces an attempt at counterfactual history in which we still end up where we are. The possibilities offered by fiction are used to imaginatively restore those obscured currents – revolutionary socialism, the working…