Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Making It, Faking It
A century has now elapsed since F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. Its author had had high hopes for it, especially after the embarrassing failure of his play The Vegetable. Not only did he want this new book to be a commercial success, he also hoped it would lead to his being taken…
Our Sinéad
Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters, by Allyson McCabe, Texas University Press, 209 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1477325704 The Real Sinéad O’Connor, by Ariane Sherine, Pen & Sword Books, 179 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1036108236 Sinéad O’Connor’s Universal Mother, by Adele Bertei, Bloomsbury, 98 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 979-8765106914 Sinéad O’Connor was only twenty-four years old when people started writing…
Autumn in Kyiv
September 6th, 2025: On Shevchenko Boulevard, plums are being sold by old women clad in anoraks and scarves in spite of the September sun. Every time I come to Kyiv, I can sense the mood of the nation through the military posters. Female soldiers are more prominent this time and there are images of soldiers…
Aschenbach’s Last Journey
In May 1911, a few months before Gustav von Aschenbach first became a figment of his pen, Thomas Mann was staying with his wife and brother Heinrich on the wooded island of Brioni on the Istrian peninsula, holiday haunt of the Habsburg monarchy. Moving the holiday across to the other side of the Adriatic was…
It’s all ‘Mesearch’
My sister-in-law has been a lifelong fan of Sean Combs (Puff Daddy as was – Diddy if you will). In March 2024, the redoubtable icon of hip hop found himself, not for the first time, at the receiving end of some unwanted criminal justice attention. The scrolling public watched as searches were carried out in…
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…