Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
America Dreaming
There was a time when the American Dream was taken to mean the integration of immigrants and a reasonable level of prosperity for all. Yet it is reasonable to point out the term’s elasticity of meaning, and that today some…
Washing the Nation’s Dirty Laundry
The women interned in mother-and-baby homes not only did forced penance for other people’s sins. They also quite literally washed the laundry of the state, including that of institutions like hospitals, the National Library, Áras an Uachtaráin and the ESB.
Scholarship, snobbery, skulduggery
Sir John Harold Plumb was a prodigious historian and journalist. a tireless networker, a professor, master of Christ’s College, a member of the British Wine Standards Board. He collected porcelain, paintings, wine, acolytes, enemies, dowager duchesses and other people’s wives.
Red Shift
The Soviet Union was happy in the 1980s to forge links with a party that was acquiring more than its fair share of young intellectuals, many with influence in the Irish trade union movement. Nevertheless, Sinn Féin the Workers Party’s…
Waiting for Big Brother
Most biography of Orwell carries the assumption that his whole writing life was a preparation for his final work. This may well be so: the heroes and heroines of the earlier novels tend to be placed, alone or friendless, at…
Seeking Hardy’s Thrush
It was Thomas Hardy’s ‘darkling thrush’, who flung his soul upon the gloom of the dawning 20th century, that brought Seamus Heaney to Dorset as the 21st began. Heaney’s dedication to all the voices and languages of the archipelago may…
Enemies of the Nation
In late 19th century France, the propagandists of the far right warned that the nation faced a mortal enemy, a parasitical stranger who could not be assimilated. This was the Jew. Today the far right sees an almost identical foe,…
Owning Up
After initial attempts to simply forget the past and focus on economic reconstruction, Germany’s record of coming to terms with Nazi-era crimes has been impressive. The same, regrettably, cannot be said of the US with regard to the history of…
A Safe European Home
In 2015 Germany and Austria agreed on a policy which resulted in the resettling in Europe of more than a million Syrian refugees ‑ a far less daunting business than dealing with 30 million displaced people in the aftermath of…
Fearing the Forest
Max Porter’s follow up to ‘Grief is the Thing with Feathers’ explores the physicality of language, earthiness, the smell of ink and metal in print. The layout of the text is highly experimental: words drip, curl and crawl off the…
Through the Tarmac
In Deborah Levy’s new novel we are left with a sense of boundless complexity, the intertwining of present, future and past, of memory, dream and wish, hurt and desire, presence and absence, love and hate, and everything that slides between…
Waltzes and Quicksteps
Gerald Dawe has managed throughout his writing life to evade contamination with the sectarian and ideological toxins that pervade his native Northern ground. In his person and in his work he is the consummate united Irishman, equally at home in…