Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Lifting the Boats
Saving the Future: How Social Partnership Shaped Ireland’s Economic Success By Tim Hastings, Brian Sheehan & Padraig Yeates, Blackhall Publishing, 200 pp, €25, ISBN: 978-1842181355 The economic boom in Ireland since the early 1990s has seen the economy grow by over 140 per cent and Irish standards of living rise from 70 per cent of…
Voices of the Dispossessed
Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory, by Guy Beiner, University of Wisconsin Press, 488 pp, £28.95, ISBN: 978-0299218201 Leabhar Mhaidhc Dháith: Scéalta agus Seanchas ón Rinn, ed Máirtín Verling, An Sagart An Díseart An Daingean , ISBN: 978-1903896320 In her survey of Hungarian folklore genres Linda Dégh remarked, with…
The Modernist Volcano
Ezra Pound: Poet (A Portrait of the Man and his Work) I: The Young Genius 1885-1920, by A David Moody, Oxford University Press, 544 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0199215577 In a poem, “Monumentum Aere, Etc.”, first published in 1914 in Blast, a short-lived but highly influential magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis that styled itself the “Review of the…
Fencing Ireland’s Poets
Irish Bardic Poetry and Rhetorical Reality, by Michelle O’Riordan, Cork University Press, 455 pp, €55.00, ISBN: 978-1859184141 There’s an odd European country which loves to make a fuss about its writers and has brought the commercial exploitation of six or eight of them to a peak of perfection. But strange to say, that self-same country…
Parsing Irish Paralysis
Outrageous Fortune, by Joe Cleary, Field Day Publications, 320 pp, €25, ISBN: 978-0946755356 In the final chapter of his Irish Classics (Granta Books, 2000), Declan Kiberd describes and decries the intellectual stagnation and somnolence of literature departments in Irish universities, as far as Irish literature was concerned, from the foundation of the state until at least the late…
Northern Miniaturist
It is not love, it is hope that saves. To hope is perhaps weariness, but in the desert where there is no other coolness than death, the shadow of the future is all that remains. This short poem is typical of the work of Gösta Agren, one of Europe’s finest and yet least known poets….
Cold Warrior
Stalin’s Wars: from World War to Cold War, 1939-1953, Yale University Press, 496 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0300112041 With Stalin’s Wars, Geoffrey Roberts offers the reader a classic grand narrative of World War II (or, as the Russians know it, the Great Patriotic War) and the inception of the Cold War from a Soviet perspective. Based principally…
Those Crazy Turks
Books referred to in this article: Su Cilgin Turkler, by Turgut Ozakman, Bilgi Yayinevi, Istanbul, November 2005 (231st print run) A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1989 The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and…
Small State, Big World
Late last year, as I was returning from a business trip to Warsaw, the LOT flight was full of young and not so young Poles. I was one of the few native Irish passengers. As the plane touched down, there was a spontaneous outburst of applause. Exiting from the baggage claim area, there were crowds…
Too Much Too Soon
Windows on the World, by Frederic Beigbeder, Fourth Estate, 320 pp, £9.99, ISBN: 978-0007184699 Falling Man, by Don DeLillo, Picador, 256 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0330452236 A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus, Pocket Books, 256 pp, £7.99, ISBN: 978-1416522850 The Good Life, by Jay McInerney, Bloomsbury, 368 pp, £7.99, ISBN: 978-0747585817 The Emperor’s Children,…
The Best Circles
Cycling in Victorian Ireland, by Brian Griffin, Nonsuch Publishing, 220 pp, €17.99, ISBN: 978-1845885625 A popular way of condemning something as hopelessly outmoded or irrelevant is to describe it as Victorian. Yet contemporary Dubliners are invited to gasp at that latest technological marvel the tram, while another late Victorian innovation in transport, the underground railway,…
To Aran or Isfahan
Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space, by Cees Nooteboom, Vintage Books, 240 pp, £7.99, ISBN 978-0099453789 It may be something of a miracle that the Dutch travel writer and novelist Cees Nooteboom has come to understand himself as a nomad. Many years ago, he claims, he presented himself to the abbot of a monastery…