Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
My Name Is James …
James, by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 320 pp, $28, ISBN: 978-0385550369 In a scene from the film American Fiction, Monk Ellison, a frustrated writer who can’t find a publisher for his next novel because it isn’t ‘black enough’, is told by his agent that his dashed-off pseudonymous satire My Pafology – deliberately written to mock the…
Rational Creatures
Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson, John Murray, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1529369991 In mid-eighteenth-century England, a group of literary women emerged who presented the society of their time with the possibility of the existence of something new – ‘a socially acceptable intelligent woman’. Susannah Gibson’s engaging new work, Bluestockings, The First Women’s…
The Tale of a Tiger
Ireland’s Long Economic Boom: The Celtic Tiger Economy, 1986-2007, by Eoin O’Malley, Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp, €53.49 and Open Access, ISBN: 978-3031530692 This book by economist Eoin O’Malley is an excellent, analytical study of the reasons why Ireland, one of the poorest economies in Europe, was transformed within a relatively short period into one…
Whatever you say, say nothing
Micheál Martin has accused the anti-NATO lobby of consistently claiming that Ireland faces the threat of membership of a military alliance, conscription into a European army, and even the presence of ‘NATO tanks in O’Connell Street’. In the Dáil, Bríd Smith asked Martin did he want to send the sons and daughters of ‘mostly working…
Saving the Enlightenment
Like it or not we are stuck with the Enlightenment. That much spoken of phenomenon and reactions to it comprise the greater part of our active political and intellectual heritage. Personally, I never much cared for the term. It has a grandiose and born-again evangelical tone, which strikes me as excessively self-important and fundamentally ahistorical….
A Progressive Abroad
Why did the Kilkenny-born writer Francis Hackett emigrate so soon after finishing his secondary education at Clongowes in 1900? Why did he not go on to UCD? Why, despite working briefly for the leading Irish-American figure, lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn, did he not settle into the Irish-American cultural milieu like his…
Failing Better
Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews, Four Courts Press, 216 pp, €26.95, ISBN: 978-1801511407 The decade after the death of an acclaimed dramatist generally sees a rise or fall in their fortunes, and the deciding of a reputation. Brian Friel would seem to be an exception to this rule. He died in 2015, not quite…
Toy Story
In the course of 2023, RTÉ was plunged into an existential crisis that appeared to be largely of its own making. It seemed that one scandal after another was being revealed in the press or in sessions of Oireachtas committees. The feeble and evasive attempts by some of the station’s senior management to offer explanations…
Imperishable Song
One of the many remarkable aspects of the recent selection of Seamus Heaney’s letters (The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid, published by Faber & Faber) is the recurring echo of WB Yeats’s voice. Heaney frequently used Yeats’s vocabulary and diction when writing to fellow poets or others likely to appreciate the echo….
Ukraine Diary
January 2nd, 2024 The rain wouldn’t let up last night, this morning really. At 3.10 am I picked up my phone to find a Substack note linked to a piece on Gaza that had a familiar construction: commonly recognised facts, followed by unnecessary adjectives, significant omissions, self-indulgent insertion of personal disgust, all tied together with…
Myths About Migration
This year an unprecedented number of elections are taking place around the world. At or near the top of the agenda in many of them is immigration. Hardly any other issue has a more polarising impact. Fear, suspicion and ignorance fill the spaces around it. Xenophobic falsehoods are being widely disseminated. The arrival in Europe…
Witness for the Prosecution
The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick, Verso, 265 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1788735506 In a TLS podcast in March 2021 the reviewers Thea Lenarduzzi, Lucy Dallas and novelist Claire Lowdon tried to puzzle out why eighty-something-year-old Vivian Gornick was ‘having a moment’. None could fully account for whey the critic, essayist and memoirist was…