Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Paper-thin Walls
The late Peter Sutherland was ‘among the most influential powerbrokers of the last thirty years or so’. Unfortunately, his biographer’s inability to seriously grapple with his exercise of that power causes the reader to veer between exasperation and, too often,…
An Ordinary Evil
‘Game of Thrones’ is ubiquitous in our culture, yet two-thirds of millennial Americans do not know what Auschwitz is. A new study of Josef Mengele reminds us that we do not live in a world of sorcerers and dragons but…
A Lick of Red Paint
The silence of British Marxists on the long conflict in Ireland
Standing Up for Justice
Mary Ann McCracken, sister of the executed 1798 leader Henry Joy, was an advanced thinker, a dedicated philanthropist and a model of composure, dignity and firmness. Long surviving her brother, she could be seen on Belfast docks aged 88 handing…
The Tigress in Winter
Your race is run: the last days of Margaret Thatcher
A Fetish for Failure
A few years ago the injunction to ‘Fail again. Fail better’ emerged as a mantra for the Silicon Valley types, ‘upfailing’ being, in inspirationalist thinking, just a stage of growth and self-enrichment. One shouldn’t need to say that this is…
Listen up, kid
One hundred celebrities offer advice that they feel might have been useful to their younger selves long before they were famous – and in many cases rich. The advice ranges from the endearing to the surprisingly revelatory, to the brave…
Navigating loss
Mary Noonan’s descriptive powers recall, in their meticulous detail, Elizabeth Bishop. She is a poet of the senses – this collection is drenched in colour, from the blue of her father’s eyes to the dreamy greens of the swamps, but…
Nobber is Hell
It is Co Meath in the fourteenth century, the plague year of 1348 in fact, and on the frontier a group of Norman adventurers brushes up against the Gaels. The ensuing bloody clash resembles the chance encounter of a sewing…
Down among the Greeks
References to a First Communion, a birthday, suggest a recognisably Irish calendar, where seasons, generations, routine festivals, interweave, and time tolerates these interlocking layers of the traditional and brand-new, which sit alongside a range of reference from classical mythology.
Ulysses Usurped
The protagonist of Mary Costello’s new novel is a Joyce obsessive. Sadly, he seems to have been less enriched than ruined by ‘Ulysses’. And while desperately trying to be Leopold Bloom, he has more of a touch of Stephen Dedalus…
The past present
What distinguishes Peter Sirr’s latest collection from the usual themes of nostalgia and consciousness of time passing is a kind of psychic connection with both the observed and the unseen worlds, a conflation of past and present, where ‘centuries hang…