Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
What Spies Do
Sean Bourke and the springing from jail of Russian agent George Blake
The Book in the World
Should ‘Ulysses’ be feted as a great novel, or a great something else?
The City and the Book
The city centred: the importance of the culture of Dublin in ‘Ulysses’
The Necessity of Yeats
Joseph M Hassett writes: The twenty-eighth day of January 2022 marks the eighty-third anniversary of the death of WB Yeats. Anniversaries remind us to step outside the relentless flow of time and ponder a moment of significance. Anniversaries of deaths are especially meaningful because absence heightens focus on essence. They are fruitful occasions to heed…
A Revolutionary’s Life
An affectionate portrait of Ernie O’Malley in war and in exile
Family Troubles
Nobel laureate Louise Glück’s poetic use of figures from Greek mythology
Wheeler Dealers
Luke Cassidy’s novel of drug deals, heists and mess-ups along the border
Making Israel Unreal
Opinion: The faulty thinking of the boycott and divestment campaign
Caldron Bubble
Where the line that separates our lives from chaos seems alarmingly thin
From out of the Box
Vona Groarke marshals her strengths to poems notably apt for ‘these times’
Hello to Berlin
Dropping in, not dropping out: Irish emigrants find a new destination
Hugging Stalin
Growing up under, and then losing, the certainty that socialism will win