The environmentalist James Lovelock has argued that climate change is a threat, like war, where political process must adapt to the moment, that it may be necessary to “put democracy on hold for a while”. Though it would be hard…

Although the urge to control and condemn was at its most explicit in relation to works dealing with religion and Irish history, it could surface in other contexts. On the prospect of the lower Irish being taught Greek and Roman…

Todorov’s version of secularism, however, is a sane and balanced one, where the state does not encroach on the church and the church does not encroach on the state. Though one suspects he is not personally religious, his writing is…

De Valera’s policies protected and promoted indigenous economic activity, which was often under the control of a Protestant business class who quickly reconciled themselves to life in the new state, as did most of their co-religionists, who were never persecuted…

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…