Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
On the Waves of the Surreal
Some Irish modernists – Flann O’Brien most obviously – have incorporated surreal elements in their fiction. The tradition has recently received a boost through the work of the Moscow-born and Dublin-based writer, editor, translator and publisher, Anatoly Kudryavitsky.
Betrayal
We should be sceptical when great powers tell us a region is riven by age-old, unresolvable conflicts and hatreds. This was the kind of mystification that in 1938 supplied Britain and France with an excuse to abandon their ally Czechoslovakia,…
Turn On, Tune In, Help Out
The aim of any left-wing project worth its name surely has to be human emancipation. Perhaps the real strength of Corbynism might turn out to be its ability to incubate a new radical political culture rather than discovering a new…
Life, Death, Clean Water
By the 1990s, seven prose works by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó had appeared in French, ten in Czech and seventeen in German, while there are now more translations in Italian even than in English. How does this neglect impinge…
No Homes To Go To
In a situation where housing has been ‘commodified’ and has become more an investment good than a form of shelter or a human right, unless the state takes on a strong management role the prospect of owning one’s own home…
A Novel Enterprise
Daniel Defoe was a prolific journalist, producing no fewer than 560 journals, tracts and books yet somehow always in debt. His various schemes included attempts to sell marine insurance and to breed civet cats – and the writing of what…
Protestant and Irish
Three historians discuss issues raised by a new anthology outlining the varieties of Protestant experience in independent Ireland. Topics touched upon include religious segregation in education, privileged access to employment, and its disappearance, and national feeling.
The Sex Economy, Monica O’Connor
Is prostitution, or ‘sex work’ as it is increasingly called, simply a market transaction, perfectly legitimate as long as the sale is voluntary? Or is it something which is inherently harmful, which sustains criminality and undermines the very idea of…
The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells
It’ll be forty degrees today in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory, but it’s likely to go down to thirty-eight around midweek and then plummet to thirty-two in a fortnight’s time as autumn takes hold. But hey, what do I…
Lotharingia: Europe’s Lost Country, Simon Winder
Pity the poor continental children who must grapple with Charles the Bald, Charles the Bold, Charles the Fat, Charles the Simple, Philip the Bold, Philip the Fair and a good dozen of Henrys. To all of this complexity, Winder is…
Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right, Liz Fekete
Perhaps what most of us currently want to know about the extreme right is how dangerous is it? To which the answer might vary from country to country. And is it likely to become more dangerous? Will it be isolated,…
Why Nationalism, Yael Tamir,
But why should there be just two forms of nationalism? There is Trump’s “America First”, there is Viktor Orbán’s quite dour Hungarian nationalism, there is French nationalism, which is arguably based on a notion of cultural and intellectual superiority; there…