Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
It’s Not All Bad
Term report: wealth, good; population, v. good; equality, could do better
The Night Walker
As the lamps come on, thoughts of a connoisseur of the crepuscular
Getting Even
A personal history of the new Irish feminism of the 1970s
An Teanga on Tour
Gaelic Ireland’s many encounters with continental European culture
A German Requiem
Fashion model, rocker, poet, addict: the strange life of the singer Nico
Getting Known
A memoir of Patrick Kavanagh, the reflections of Thomas McCarthy
The Banana Bunch
Vargas Llosa’s study of the overthrow of democracy and reform in Guatemala
At last to Ithaca
Derek Mahon: a poetic style balanced between levity and profundity
Preaching Poppycock
Yeats’s authoritarianism: the Rapallo circle and Italian fascism
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’