Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Just Ourselves
In his 1993 book Pleasant the Scholar’s Life: Irish Intellectuals and the Construction of the Nation State, Maurice Goldring emphasised the role of intellectuals in shaping Irish cultural nationalism. He distinguished between revolts and revolutions. Without some articulation of ideas that might drive change a revolt could never become a revolution: ‘Gavroche, in Les Misérables,…
The Gate Keepers
‘Filterworld’ is Kyle Chayka’s term for the systems of algorithmic recommendations that make up an ever greater part of contemporary life. In this collection of determining feeds we find Google, Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and many more. Taken together, they make up a high-powered and hugely influential complex of dynamic…
Beyond Defiance
A People Under Siege: The Unionists of Northern Ireland, from Partition to Brexit and Beyond, by Aaron Edwards, Merrion Press, 360 pp, €19.99, ISBN: 978-1785372995 The Ghost Limb: Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798, by Claire Mitchell, Beyond the Pale Books, 256 pp, £15, ISBN: 978-1914318191 As the social and political ground shifts in…
The Devouring Mind
Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, by Robert Boyers, Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press, 256 pp, $24.95, ISBN: 978-1942134886 Many critics – and critics are my subject here – spend their lives adding tile after tile to the mosaic of a False Self. A university degree, a glittering essay, an…
Rage for Profit
There was a drumbeat for RTÉ blood-letting coursing through Irish newspapers in the latter part of 2023, a heady staccato of accusations in bold headlines: bad management and weak governance at the national broadcaster, secret pay deals, scandalous spending, hidden slush funds … debacle, furore, fiasco, farce! This was probably the worst emergency to have…
The Trump Enigma
Here we go again. For the third consecutive presidential election, US voters are likely to face a choice between a moderate career politician and an angry demagogue for whom lying and gaslighting are not just nasty political tactics but governing principles and reflexive personal traits. The result, the polls tell us, could go either way….
Orwell: The Rewrite
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder, Viking, 464 pp, £10, ISBN: 978-0241482728 Eileen O’Shaughnessy married George Orwell in 1936 and remained married to him until her unexpected and untimely death in 1945. Anna Funder’s Wifedom is primarily an analysis of that nine-year marriage, which Funder concludes as having been throughout to Eileen’s disadvantage,…
Beyond Revisionism
In a recent interview with The Irish Times, Roy Foster volunteered a striking comment: ‘The whole revisionism thing,’ he asserted, ‘is over.’ The remark is notable because, perhaps more than any other Irish historian of his generation, Foster built his reputation on a commitment to revisionism. Now that the outlook is avowedly a thing of…
The Third Man
The Material for Victory: The Memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle, Laurence J Kettle (ed), introduction and additional biographical note by Niamh Reilly and annotations by Niamh Reilly and Jane O’Brien, The Open Press at the University of Galway, 300 pp, €20, ISBN: 978-1911690146 (paperback), 978-1911690153 (ebook) Andrew J Kettle (1833 – 1916) can lay just…
Heaven Can Wait
The Good Enough Life, by Daniel Miller, Polity, 280 pp, £17.99, ISBN: 978-1509559657 The world is full of war, fear, anger and hatred. One of the big questions for moral philosophers and anyone else interested in living a good life is why human beings can’t co-exist in peace and harmony. Why can’t they be content…
Hatred’s Underground Streams
How fast is the influence of the far right in Ireland growing? This question has been on the agenda of public discussion since the assertion of the Garda Commissioner in May 2023 that the far right has failed to grow in Ireland, bucking trends in other European countries. ‘Across Europe,’ he said, ‘we have seen…
A Hyphenated Identity
Like the optimistic white rectangle in the Irish tricolour, with its promise of conciliation between the Orange and the Green, the hyphen in ‘Anglo-Irish’ serves to obscure a dangerously intractable anomaly; and the career of Roger Casement, loyal servant of empire turned nationalist rebel, readily epitomises that contradiction. In the last of three tributes to…