Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Science? Who Needs It?
In the third year of the reign of the Bablyonian king Belshazzar, the Book of Daniel tells us, the captive Jewish seer Daniel had a vision. A ram with two long horns dominated all the beasts around it and grew ever stronger. But a billy goat with a single massive horn came from the west…
Both Sides Now
These Divided Isles: Britain and Ireland, Past and Future, by Philip Stephens, Faber & Faber, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0571381470 Philip Stephens’s These Divided Isles is bookended by what surely represents the high watermark of modern Anglo-Irish relations: Queen Elizabeth II’s 2011 state visit to Dublin. The event was widely hailed as symbolic of the…
A Light and Heartless Hand
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, by Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury, 408 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1526668030 At one point early in Muriel Spark’s novel of 1981, Loitering with Intent, her protagonist and alter ego Fleur Talbot is brought to a standstill in the middle of a populous London pathway by a joyous perception which comes…
Honey, I’m home!
A woman speaks to camera about how to serve your husband. She says, ‘submission has become a dirty word’. She details her journey from ‘hardcore feminist’ to proponent of traditional femininity – softness, bread, being a helpmeet. The woman talking is my sister; I have watched this video maybe ten times. My sister is one…
Twice Blest
Mercy, by Joan Silber, Counterpoint, 256 pp, $27, ISBN: 978-1640097070 There are some writers whose stories make you feel as if you are gently rafting down a river, watching the scenery drift by. Penelope Fitzgerald. William Maxwell. Tessa Hadley. The journey is seemingly effortless, the landscape deceptively typical. Until you pay careful attention. Until you…
A Fruitful Reticence
Vinegar Hill, by Colm Tóibín, Carcanet, 144 pp., £12.99, ISBN: 978-1800171619 The Poems (1961-2020), by Derek Mahon, The Gallery Press, 532 pp., £19.50, ISBN: 978-1911338048 On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín, Princeton University Press, 210 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978 0691154114 Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978-0374125585 Selected Poems,…
The Thing with Rivers
Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane. Hamish Hamilton, 374 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241624814 Incubating the Trout. The Story of the Oldest Salmonid Hatchery in the World and the Environmental Fight to Protect It, by Kevin Prunty, Book Hub Publishing, 72 pp, €12, ISBN: 978-1068649073 Like Bedřik Smetana’s symphonic poem The Moldau, this book opens…
Appointment
Johnny Lyons writes: I am thrilled to take up the role of managing editor with the drb, a journal of which I have long been an avid reader and to which, in more recent times, I have been a proud contributor. The drb has made an incalculable contribution to Irish intellectual life and I intend…
Fascism in America
The ghost of Karl Marx is haunting America again. This time it is galvanising a far-right revolution that has traumatised everyone in America (with the likely exception of those inside the MAGA movement) and shocked people elsewhere who thought they ‘knew’ America. This includes those of us who have lived, studied and worked there and…
The Monad Unchained
The Nazis conducted their genocide in secret, and took pains to ensure that this secrecy would survive the war. After the failed prisoner uprising of August 2nd, 1943 – when it was already clear to every sentient German that the war was as good as lost – the SS set about dismantling the death factory…
A ‘Sublime’ Friendship
Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own. Isaiah Berlin They were indeed potentially quite incompatible….
A Crack in the Cosmos
Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the…