Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Then Again
Politics has become a pageant of scandals, with high moral dudgeon the preferred rhetorical mode. In flight from uncertainty, we have abjured the ethical obligation to be uncertain – to pause and say maybe, rather than scream yes or no….
Into Africa
An account of a young Oxford graduate heading to Addis Ababa in 1961 to teach in a prestigious school geared to servicing the needs of expatriate and privileged Ethiopian mixed-sex youth might bring to mind Evelyn Waugh. But no. This…
A Female Text
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s writing in her first prose work is as compelling and accomplished as in her best poetry. The book reveals her as a writer who is willing to take risks, to push back boundaries, refusing to let herself…
Whatever You Say
The narrator of Alice Lyons’s novel, an American of Irish stock raised in New Jersey, finds on a second visit to the auld sod that she has to learn to speak the language ‑ which is not as easy as…
The Procrustean Bed
Since her remarkable debut, ‘The Heel of Bernadette’, Colette Bryce has shown both variation and range in her work, developing a distinctive poetic personality that places her outside of and beyond the ‘Northern thing’.
Women with a Movie Camera
A new volume of critical essays aims to analyse and challenge the processes that can foster and normalise the exclusion of women in the Irish film industry, in the hope that the experiences of women in the industry will be…
Under the Still Skies
The rain never seems to stop at the Scottish cabin park of Summerwater, where the population of holidaymakers reveals itself as representative of the larger nation of which it is a sodden subset, looking for scapegoats to blame for its…
Great Upheavals, Small Triumphs
In “The Changing Mountain”, his recent essay on the mutable parameters of elegy (Poetry London Issue 96) Stephen Sexton notes “the imperceptible change a photograph, say, undergoes when someone depicted in it has died; how these images seem, somehow, utterly changed…
A World of Tears
A man finds himself in Antwerp with nothing to do. Then he remembers, among other things, that this is the town where the painter Peter Paul Rubens made his home. At first, this annoys him, because he has no interest…
A Sharp Eye in the Wild
Diary of a Young Naturalist, by Dara McAnulty, Little Toller Books, 224 pp, £16, ISBN: 978-1908213792 Dara McAnulty first came to public notice about three years ago as a blogger writing about nature and conservation from his home in Fermanagh; at the time he was particularly keen on protecting hen harriers, a species of special…
The European Way
My brother Diarmuid told me that some years ago when visiting the Church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome his “Sono irlandese” to a church official elicited the reply of “O’Neill?”. Diarmuid nodded and that was enough ‑ he was immediately brought to the tomb of the great Hugh O’Neill. O’Neill has had a…
Not Gone Away
While many commentators would argue that Sinn Féin should be awarded the prize for actually advancing traditional republican objectives over recent decades, the ‘purists’ or ‘dissidents’ who call them traitors are still with us. And will be for some time…