From McGovern through Dukakis, Kerry and perhaps now the junior senator from Illinois, the Democrats have never found a way to counteract Nixon’s characterisation of them as effete, unpatriotic liberals soft on crime and security and opposed to the sovereignty…

The liberators of two hundred years ago had as their sole aim to move out of the commercial and financial shadow of Spain and to trade wherever in the world they liked. It was not their ambition to bring a…

In a recent radio interview, Barry linked the character with that of a great-aunt who had been committed to an asylum in the 1920s and was subsequently hardly ever mentioned. When she was mentioned the comment was that “she was…

Many see Casement in a negative light; Séamas Ó Síocháin does not. He is both neutral and sympathetic. Ever avoiding judgment and letting the facts speak for themselves, he remains intrigued by Casement and in awe of his attainments. And…

Language organisations that pitch the language to this audience as part of Ireland’s valuable cultural heritage are on a hiding to nothing. The little Englander attitude towards languages – that they are all redundant in the face of English spoken…

In January 1947 Britain’s severest winter weather of the twentieth century hit, in tandem with a coal shortage. On location in Cardiff, Ronald Reagan shivered when the coin-operated heater in his Cardiff hotel ran out on one of the chilliest…

These words should send warning signals: most of the authors are exponents of a brand of African political sociology that is overly fond of neologisms and obscure typologies. Patrick Chabal talks about “neo-patrimonialism”; Christine Messiant writes about “the mutation of…

His liberalisation of the laws regulating abortion, homosexuality and divorce followed an idiosyncratic individualism which Trudeau saw as the logical outcome of his Catholic faith. Like a certain strand among Catholics in the Victorian era, Trudeau’s liberalism grew out of…

Swift was genuinely kind to the young couple, helping Matthew with his career as a clegyman and including them in his peculiar dinner parties at the deanery, which always involved contretemps with the servants over the quality of the food…

While some see the European Union as the only effective possible counterweight to “chaotic international networks and concentrations of power” others see it as another manifestation of globalisation, driven by a quasi-religious faith in the market, competition and privatisation. “This,”…

The adoption of an amendment process that required a referendum to approve any constitutional change can be explained by de Valera’s need to establish the people as the font of all authority and thereby marginalise extreme nationalists. More troubling is…