Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
This Happy Breed
Multiple British fractures leave England alone to feast on its past
Eastward Ho!
Dublin’s expansion on the basis of the reclamation of land from the bay
Killing Bad Guys
Lara Marlowe’s memoir of her years with Robert Fisk in love and war
Coasting
A Reader from ‘Archipelago’, a review celebrating wild Britain and Ireland
Cometh the Day
The case for the union, and the case for respecting law and democracy
Tell us a Story
The pursuit of fictive pleasure: on not getting Fernando Pessoa
Station of the Cross
Irish television: a dangerous medium is launched in a Catholic country
The Smartest Boy
The moral failings and deep hypocrisy of an unusually able Taoiseach
Virtue Unrewarded
Jonathan Franzen’s America is a place of insecurity and confusion.
Sweating the Asset
The rise of private monopolies in the wake of the Thatcher ‘revolution’
The Road to Justice
The long fight for recognition of the Magdalene laundries survivors
Longing for Flight
Time on our hands: the locked-down poet raids memories of past travel