Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Synge’s Violin
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…
How Firm A Foundation?
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…
The Melting Centre
The electoral decline of the large parties has been accompanied by a massive fall in party membership. Since the early 1990s the SPD has lost over 400,000 members and the CDU nearly 300,000. They have also become less attractive to…
A New Life
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…
Good Old Queens
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…
A Revolutionary Janus
In a sense, most of the old guard never fully understood, and certainly never accepted the consequences of, the process they had initiated. If they had, they would have released control of the Workers Party with good grace to De…
Against the Demon
As settlers and administrators spread into the region, the world ended for countless indigenous communities in unreported acts of violence. Vast slave kingdoms were established. The legendary Colonel Fawcett remembered: “The atrocities on the Putumayo in Peru, disclosed by Sir…
Time Bends in the Sun
Future breakthroughs may reveal that Einstein and his theories of relativity are not entirely correct and like Newton’s theories merely an approximation of nature. To quote Newton again: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but…
The Need to Disguise
Central to Alice Munroe’s aesthetic is the device, though it is really much more than a device, of jumping back and forward in time, enabling readers to hold multiple strands of the narrative in their consciousness, creating cross-sections of event…
Empress of Asunción
In March 1870 Solano López was finally hunted down in the Paraguayan wilderness of Cerro Corá and killed by a Brazilian soldier. Panchito died with him and Lynch buried them both with her bare hands before being escorted first to…
A Discontinued People
The Saxon churches no longer have parishioners and there is not a whisper of German to be heard in the schools, since their pupils and teachers vanished altogether twenty years ago. The prolonged death agony of this community, which started…
Science and Nation
“Every jelly mass quivered – shook – moved. A moment more and the reaction had gone to a finish. Denis M’Carthy, Dublin Metropolitan Policeman, true Celt, minor poet, rose to his feet a Chemist.” The message of the parable seems…