Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Where To Next?
Joe Cleary explores world literature and Irish literature’s place in it
Down on the Farm
Farming, land and land hunger as a theme in modern Irish literature
Are We Civilised at All?
Fintan O’Toole’s personal narrative of Ireland’s ‘ascent to normality’
The Reunion
Leonard Cohen’s fusion of sacred and profane, of words and music
On the Brink
Breaking away from the empire: the dilemma of the 1921 Treaty negotiators
Wild Child
Early to late: questions about the conventional Jane Austen timeline
A Man of Many Parts
A brilliant historian and teacher who kept faith with the republic
The Man From Nowhere
Rallying the great and the good to build the European project from above
Now This Is The Truth
A satire on the political PR industry reminiscent of Waugh’s ‘Scoop’
The Destruction Principle
A working class striver and skiver in one, at home with the underdog
Whatever You Say
No news: letters from John McGahern, who didn’t like writing letters
Cain’s World
A protest against ‘the developer’ and paean to the wildness within