John Stanislaus Joyce started out with around £1,000 in capital and numerous family connections but fell through the net of middle class privilege, bringing his family with him. Joyce senior must in many ways have been a representative figure. As…

Nor is good prose necessarily something that is found only in fiction: in an essay commemorating Irish Times journalist Dick Walsh, McGahern notes that “the style he forged is highly individual. Mixing the language of the street and field and…

Slater compares his letters to Catherine with those he wrote to Maria Beadnell; those from the earlier affair are full of unguarded passion and high-flown rhetoric while those to Catherine are more matter of fact, even stern: “if you really…

Limiting the size of financial institutions seems a likely and probably popular outcome, in the shape of something like the so-called “Volcker Rule”, named after Paul Volcker, formerly the chair of the Federal Reserve and now a key adviser to…

To many readers, the attraction lies in this firm refusal of mystery about the act itself (though to Philip Larkin, the prospect of visiting universities to explain how a poem was written was “like going round explaining how you sleep…

Hermes records in his narrative the complicated relations of the Godley family, as they wait for the patriarch, Adam, to die. Once a celebrated mathematician, he is a sombre, philosophising intellectual who has never come to terms with the mundanity…

According to ethnic fade theory, with the days of “No Irish Need Apply” having been, as it were, officially declared over, there was no longer any need for “Irish” as a social or civic marker any more. Ethnicity became a…

In requiring “regular metrical pulses” of “folk” music White is surely smarting from an overexposure to the regular grumbling of the bodhran, which indeed the great and grumbling uilleann player Seamus Ennis suggested was best played with a knife. Ennis’s…

Milch is offering a dramatic version of the phenomenon assessed in Mark S Schantz’s study of how evangelical Protestantism saturated nineteenth century American life and created a powerful culture of death, which actually provoked and sustained the war. A vision…

Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House has lived a lie in order to fulfil the ideal of the perfect marriage. Mrs Alving in Ghosts has played a long-drawn-out game of humouring her husband’s debauchery while being in love with someone…

Indeed, what we have in Lubiewo is a panorama of Poland in years of great turmoil without the stock heroic underground opposition and the stock brutal militia officer. Witkowski’s characters are unheroic, unengaged, unpolitical. For Lukrecja and Patrycja the barracks…