Macaulay was as appreciative as Michael McDowell of the blessings of inequality … He would doubtless have agreed with Archbishop Whately’s view, in his textbook on political economy for Irish children, that if there were no rich people there would…

The Dublin Review of Books is pleased to announce the winners of the first drb Flash Fiction Competition and to thank the authors of the 167 stories submitted from around the world. The prize for the winning story is €1,000.

Fairy tales, as the German scholar Max Luthi has pointed out, are one-dimensional, they happen on the surface, the characters are agents who perform actions and express a very limited range of emotions if any. Nonetheless, a central concern ot…

The Celtic Tiger years have seen a generation of writers emerge that has found in history a way of thinking about the present. It is unsurprising that four of the most recent high-profile Irish novels produced – from Colum McCann,…

Previously Morales insisted that coca was a legitimate crop, a gift from Pachamama, Mother Earth, and that cocaine was a problem for the Americans. “We produce our coca, we bring it to the main markets, we sell it and that’s…

Then there is the certainty that Google will miss books, skip pages, blur images and make other errors, while there is no guarantee that its copies will last. Bits become degraded over time. Documents may get lost as hardware and…

Later that evening, dressed in a hired “white tie”, I called at the residence of General Franco and escorted his granddaughter to the opera, where we sat in the royal box under the watchful eye of her duenna. Later we…

Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where the cult of celebrity holds a special place for authors and relentlessly cycles their work and personae through what Don DeLillo calls “the all-incorporating treadmill of consumption and disposal”….

Kiberd argues persuasively that “the nationalism of modern Ireland is portrayed as a neurotic reaction to Englishness” and that “Irishness must be in all respects the opposite of Englishness, and masculinity the opposite of femininity”. In this context Bloom is…

The novel argues that Russia was already lost by the time of the February Revolution that the country was so totally demoralised by liberal and socialist ideas that it could only deliver itself tamely into the hands of the Bolsheviks….

In August 1880 Parnell acted as Michael Horgan’s best man at his wedding. When he came to fetch the groom he thought him nervous and insisted on his drinking some champagne before setting out for the church. Horgan’s mother used…

One of the more unofficial Irish representatives in Germany, the Irish-American gunrunner John T Ryan, may have come into direct contact with Hitler in May 1923 when he was running guns for the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. Hitler…