Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Spurning the Dust
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J Casey, Footnote Press, 404 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-804440995 Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, by Brigitte Studer, Verso Books, 496 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-1839768019 American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, by Julia L…
A Failure to Return
John Montague: A Poet’s Life, by Adrian Frazier, Lilliput Press, 500 pp, €24.95, ISBN: 978-1843519102 A serious biography, properly considered, is a very curious kind of book. It takes a certain nerve on the part of the author to venture on what the reader must hope will be a fair, accurate and considered account of…
Uncanny Valley
One of the strangest things about our current moment is the seemingly abrupt right turn of the tech industry in support of the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. This is especially unsettling for Irish people, long used to being the affable middleman between a welcoming America and a more culturally inscrutable Europe. Those of us who…
The Mysterious Alice Munro
In July 2024, three months after Alice Munro died, her daughter, Andrea Munro Skinner, published an essay in the Toronto Star, revealing that her mother’s husband and her own stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her when she was a child. Sixteen years after the abuse occurred Alice Munro was told of it. She decided…
Talkin’ about a Revolution
Hegel’s World Revolutions, by Richard Bourke, Princeton University Press, 344 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0691250182 Is human history ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ or rather a heroic story of the inevitable unfolding of human progress? Apart from professional optimists like Steven Pinker, most of us might feel on…
Hardened Skin in the Game
It comes from somewhere, whatever it is. Folks say it starts as a whisper on the Atlantic air: a wheeze, a rustle, a ripple, a swell coming in on the cold; then a sulphurous bouquet of fishy salt and maybe blood. In time, it rises from the sea, a churning vortex. One can, presumably, see…
Don’t Make a Fuss
Munichs, by David Peace, Faber & Faber, 464 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-0571381166 The triumphs and tragedies of leading football clubs mean a great deal to many people. But while their fortunes, on and off the pitch, receive blanket media coverage, they rarely feature in literary fiction. One of the few authors who has approached the…
Blame it on the Boogeyman
Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us, by Anna Bogutskaya, Faber & Faber, 244 pp American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond, by Jeremy Dauber, Algonquin Books, 468 pp The ghost of Jamie Bulger haunted the margins of my childhood, and it returned to haunt my…
The Political Pen
Orwell – the new life, by DJ Taylor, Constable, 960 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1472132987 Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor, Yale University Press, 224 pp, £18.99, ISBN: 978-0300272987 ‘To read him and write about him is one of the greatest satisfactions I know,’ writes DJ Taylor of George…
Helping Spain
‘But to me our real shame lies in our silence regarding Fascism. We must be anti Fascist or all our history is a lie.’ Thus wrote poet Ewart Milne to Muriel MacSwiney on May 19th, 1942, at a stage in World War Two when it was by no means certain that the forces of fascism…
We Done It
We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, Viking, 464 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-0241608364 Want a cosy mystery that takes place partly in Dublin, Cork, and RTÉ’s studios? We Solve Murders fits the bill. How about a cosy mystery with a grand, idiosyncratic detective champion? That’s not We Solve Murders. Marple. Maigret. Marlowe. Holmes. Poirot. Montalbano. Gamache….
Looking for an Enemy
Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (eds), Peter Lang, 298 pp, €49.40, ISBN: 978-1800790834 The publication of this volume could hardly have come at a worse time for its reception by a world outraged by the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinian civilians,…