A study of the promotion of Ireland through art in the United States provides, thanks to its author’s formidable research, a tapestry of who is who, and where and how they lived and dined, between Dublin, Chicago and New York,…

Spoken Chinese is a tonal language quite unlike English – with four possible tones to each sound and a fifth atonal sound that can turn a sentence into a question. The chief problems that translators of ‘Ulysses’ have faced in…

If the purpose of satire is to change the world, or at least to change the ways in which we think about it, do poets like Kevin Higgins do more than elicit complacent smiles from those who already agree with…

American business has been striking a newly pious note, emphasising its duties towards customers, employees, suppliers, communities. Unsurprisingly, there is nothing about the state, or a corporation’s obligation to pay taxes that can be used for the benefit of citizens.

Seosamh Mac Grianna’s best-known work, newly translated as ‘This Road of Mine’, is more novel than autobiography and is also an exploration of the relationship between art and artist. Unusually, for a work written in the 1930s in Irish, it…

Working class Dub and venerated pioneer of Burmese nationalism

Categorising groups of people as ‘Other’ is a practice that seems to be frowned upon in the best intellectual circles. But there are markers apart from ethnicity, nationality and religion. Why shouldn’t we regard those who strongly oppose our values…

Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard gives us, between the lines, the sense of a man who, while charming, could be driven and sometimes emotionally distant. He also seems to have been remarkably keen to live what he saw…

Are we, like our feline companions, creatures of biology and chance?

The early 1960s saw Ireland engaging in a concentrated round of diplomatic activity focused on a hoped-for entry to the European Economic Community. When the French veto of the UK application in 1963 also derailed the Irish one, attention turned…

It has plausibly been suggested that we now have the capability to transform the five fundamentals of the global economy ‑ information, energy, transport, fuel and materials ‑ into sustainable production at minimal costs compared to the present. The problem…

The catalyst for the growth of the world economy, manufacturing, which sparked into life in the nineteenth century and generated vast amounts of wealth, has finally exhausted itself, a new book argues. But will the end of growth also necessarily…