Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Three Presences
At this point in his review, Eliot moves toward thinking that to make sense of Yeats you have first to remember that he is an Irishman. To be an Irishman, he thinks, is to be deprived of certain attributes of…
The Birth of Frankenstein
Both irrationalism and rationalism have fallen out of favour as modes of scientific knowledge – though rationalism has resurfaced as qualitative research, and the debates about the scientific status of qualitative research are lively reminders about the uncertainty within science…
Working in the Dark
European literature has a long history of casting Africa as a disturbing enigma; the image of “the dark continent” lingered long beyond its time. But while Not Untrue and Not Unkind is yet another European novel with an enigma at…
The Border Campaign
Salandra instructed Italy’s regional governors to prepare reports for him on people’s attitudes to the coming conflict. The findings were that most people thought going to war could be justified only if the homeland was under attack. Business leaders, with…
That Clinking Clanking Sound
The reason for the shortage of books on financial crises could be that in recent years many economic writers lost interest in such matters because first, some of them believed that the keys to controlling crises had been discovered through…
One Damn Thing After Another
Burrow includes a particularly bizarre quote from Eric Hobsbawn’s history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, where he argues that nothing vindicated the Marxist economic analysis more than the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989: “[r]arely has…
Posted in France
It’s not difficult to imagine periodic cries of “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” from the editors and their understandably large team (including associate editors Dan Gunn and George Craig), particularly since we’re told the…
Getting Them Out
Coolacrease: the true story of the Pearson executions – an incident in the Irish War of Independence, by Paddy Heaney et al Aubane Historical Society, 470 pp, €20.00, ISBN: 978-1903497487 Since the publication in 1998 of Peter Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923, the experience of the Protestant community…
A Policeman’s Lot
The stereotype of the Irish cop was born in Boston, where being on the force in the latter half of the nineteenth century meant you were mostly concerned with protecting Brahmin property and cracking immigrant heads, a good portion of…
Getting and Spending
For centuries the climate dictated the way we made our living, the way we lived our lives. We are an indoor people. For centuries we made sense of ourselves and our lives by sitting around the fire telling stories. This…
Not So Dark
Here is Dowden’s description of Angola at the height of the civil war, in the 1980s: “a marxist regime armed by the Soviet Union and protected by Cuban troops is kept going by revenues from oil extracted by American oil…
Riddled With Light
O Death, you have taken Muircheartach from us, / far too late in everyone’s opinion; / snatch Tadhg quickly also to the graveyard, / those two should never be separated … / Hell is not punishment enough for him, /…