Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
The Sorry Earthmen of Bohemia
Three recently published Czech science fiction novels – all representations of worlds that by definition do not exist –are nevertheless best understood as a more or less realistic reflection of recent Czech history and politics with a collectivist moral, albeit…
Paris Destroyed, Paris Surviving
Paris has always been a moveable feast. There are many people, Parisians and others, who think the city was destroyed long before Hitler ordered it to be burned in 1944 and others who think it has been repeatedly destroyed since,…
Flying the Net
Wilde, Yeats and Joyce were important to each other, and the importance of their fathers was not lost on the sons either. Yeats later wrote that Wilde ‘knew how to keep our elders in their place’. For all three writers,…
A Girl, Undaunted
A body in the coal hole of the Carlton Club; a strangulation with a Hermes scarf: Kate Atkinson has written a sophisticated and witty espionage novel which plays with the genre’s conventions while being partially based on a WWII spy’s…
Dublin in the Wars
Before 1914 recruitment to the British army from Belfast was often less than half that of Dublin, although the Northern city had a larger population. But Belfast was an industrial powerhouse, not a sleepy provincial backwater dependent on the production…
Charging Ahead
Kevin Kiely’s poetic aim is to manufacture insight, create a visionary moment, by hurling the elements of language together, by creating a linguistic explosion. This system works often enough to make the effort worthwhile, and more than that, a pleasure,…
Mystics and Villagers
The Indian poems of Gabriel Rosenstock’s latest collection are populated by saints and stics and interspersed with allusions that reinforce an image of timelessness and transcendence, many exploring the no-man’s-land separating the known and the metaphysical world.
A Book of Discomfort
Many people say they turn to poetry for comfort. They would be advised to avoid Jessica Traynor’s work, where death and the dead are a restless, persistent force and witches direct vicious and violent magic at men in payment for…
High Jinks and Down to Earth
A poetry collection by broadcaster John Kelly is flush with acute observation and understanding, as well as sparkling felicities of imaginative detail and linguistic invention. The references range from popular culture to the natural world, with the poems marked by…
Love in the Time of Austerity
An artful, nuanced take on life in post-Tiger Ireland, Sally Rooney’s Normal People is a breathtaking reflection on love and unequal exchange between two people seeking equilibrium in a time of perilous instability.
Halting the Waves
In the last three years, more than two million immigrants – primarily young men – have entered EU states. The policies being followed by European governments in response to this phenomenon are not only harsh and oppressive, but may also…
The Biggest Question
William Vollmann is fond of tackling large subjects and writing very big books, both fiction and non-fiction. In a two-volume work on climate change he addresses himself to the future inheritors of the earth and tries to explain to them…