Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Proustian Thoughts from Ireland
A new collection of essays shows that the author of À la recherche du temps perdu had a major impact on Irish life, deeper and more extensive than commonly thought.
Reinventing the Renaissance
This high-spirited and highly personal approach to writing about the Renaissance is anything but ‘academic’.
Is Hope a Virtue?
Is it time we entertained doubts about hope’s persistent allure?
Messy versus Tidy
The shadow of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith hangs over two contemporary efforts to explain what makes nations wealthy and what makes empires decline.
Having a Reputation
A new biography of James Bryce, one time Chief Secretary of Ireland and supporter of Irish Home Rule, reveals the astonishingly varied and accomplished life of a long forgotten ‘greatest living Englishman’. This is an outstanding work of intellectual history,…
A Cosmopolitan Poet
Katrina Goldstone pays tribute to her much missed friend and mentor, the poet and scholar Gerald Dawe (1952-2024). By reflecting on his distinctive cosmopolitan sensibility, what his wife, Dorothea Melvin, dubbed ‘his European soul’, we get a surer grasp of…
Palestinians and Other Strangers
Two new studies of the plight of Palestinians and other strangers offer a glimpse of how we might hold on to solidarity as strategy and human principle. Dolefully or otherwise, writes Lori Allen, we have all been looking through our…
Poetry and Politics
Poets, more than any other kind of writers or artists, are called upon to defend their impulses and pretensions. This is particularly true in times in political crisis which we are living through right now.
Unholy Thoughts
A skillful excavation of the ‘Presbyterian archive’ has produced a surprising and captivating history of Presbyterian life in eighteenth century Ulster, a veritable Bridgerton on the Bann. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary records including letters, diaries, newspapers and…
Nocturne
A new poem from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
When is bullshit real bullshit?
It may be comforting to assert that one’s political enemies are bullshitters but one can’t help wondering whether this assertion is itself a piece of bullshit.
Whither Gay Rights?
If there was nothing inevitable about the expansion of liberty for lesbians and gay men and today nothing inevitable about the future maintenance of that liberty, what should be the strategy of the lesbian and gay rights movement?