Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Active Recovery
We first meet the author when he is twenty-eight, an aspiring writer resigned to suffering a bout of depression every summer since his mother’s death nine years earlier. He is diagnosed as bipolar but is reluctant to accept this, a…
What’s Hecuba to Him?
In his polemic on Brexit, Fintan O’Toole offers a biographical caricature of a political decision as a man ‑ a white man, a middle-aged or elderly man, an angry man, a racist man, finally a straw man. What lies behind…
Happening, Annie Ernaux
Perhaps the most striking thing about Annie Ernaux’s autofictional account of finding herself pregnant in Rouen in 1963, desperately wanting an illegal abortion but having no idea of how to go about it, is its cool and removed tone.
Who Killed My Father, Édouard Louis
“You’ve changed these past few years… We’ve talked a lot. We’ve explained ourselves.” Eddy’s father becomes proud of his gay son, the writer. He wants to know about the man his son loves. He is no longer afraid Eddy’s politics…
Show Them a Good Time, Nicole Flattery
It is not the standard quest for love. One woman hears her husband whisper “I love you” while they lie together under crisp ironed sheets as she frets about cockroaches. “She blinked anxiously in the dark, as if trying to…
Building Jerusalem
David Kynaston, in the first volume of a projected major work, accomplishes his ambition to tell the story of the postwar changes in ordinary people’s lives with a prose style that balances entertainment with erudition and in-depth historical assessment with…
One Damn Thing After Another
John Burrow’s survey of the history-writing tradition, covering practitioners as diverse as the church father Eusebius and Henry Adams’s American classics, betrays a boyish delight in a fracas. His trademark is the chuckle that implies an acceptance of imperfection. Such,…
Down on the Plantation
Slavery was not an institution in colonial Ireland. Rather the condition was reclassified as an almost ontological one, that of ‘poverty’. This had a natural alliance with ‘Irish’, just as ‘negro’ had with ‘slave’ in the racial hierarchy that helped…
Left in a Free State
Northern unionists developed the political and paramilitary muscle in the crisis of 100 years ago to defy nationalism and stay out of a united Ireland. Their Southern brethren were left with the options of accepting the will of the majority…
Mt Moi!
As a popular explainer of what philosophy is concerned with, Bryan Magee had few equals. Never, perhaps, has so much been owed by so many curious minds to a single intellect. But as his frank memoirs show, Magee was not…
Gorgeous and Sinful
Harry Clarke’s work in stained glass can be read in a variety of ways – as modernist, late Victorian, political, even apolitical, but whichever way one argues about interpretations it is hard to question his achievements.
Mistaking Identity
We are inclined to think of social identities as traits that are common to all members of a group, that a person cannot help acting like ‘a woman’ or ‘a Frenchman’. But identities are fluid and dynamic. People perform their…