Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Connoisseur of Foolishness
Today’s bulbous literary novels are remarkably tolerant of longueurs, asides and arbitrary disquisitions, says Thomas McGuane. That can be their virtue. Not so short stories. Short stories share some of the traits of poetry, which could scarcely tolerate the liberties…
Homosexuals, Drunks and Weirdos
The British recruited their intelligence officers from the top echelons of society. When many of them turned out to be working for the other side the popular press turned on this ‘elite’ and, arguably, all ‘elites’, with deleterious effects on…
On the Mend
The actor Stephen McGann has told, through the prism of health and illness, the story of his family over several generations, from their origins in Famine-scarred Roscommon, to the Liverpool slums and on to the postwar social progress which brought…
From Europe’s Borderlands
An exciting new bilingual anthology of Ukrainian poetry might remind us of a row of Soviet-era apartment blocks, with multiple kitchen windows open at the same time and different voices coming from inside. Put together, it is a melting pot…
Cut and Catch
While Tom French moves much further afield in several of the poems in his new collection, enlarging his range and what might be called his world view, it is to localism and ‘the small things of the day’ that he…
Playing with the Bits
Misery, Paul Muldoon would have us know, wasn’t just back then. We’re still mired in it. His pessimism is bracing but never depressing: this has quite a lot to do with his wit and his lightness, both of which are…
The Hive Mind
Charged with reviving the ‘New Republic’, Franklin Foer hired good writers. Quality improved but sales didn’t. ‘Data specialists’ were hired, who insisted that the editor should focus on ‘snackable content’. He complied, but then resigned and wrote a very interesting…
Crème de la Crème
A third of Britain’s land still belongs to her aristocracy, nearly half of Scotland is in the hands of 432 individuals and companies and more than a quarter of large Scottish estates are held by aristocratic families. As an impressive…
A Gift of Cleverness
In 1931 William Empson arrived to teach at the Imperial University of Tokyo. Unable to speak Japanese and undoubtedly intimidated by officialdom, he turned inward instead, remarking all sorts of new energies in language, life and art and finding things…
Between Memory and Hope
America’s founding generation, it has been said, was divided between the party of memory and that of hope, between those who saw the need for periodic revolution to start the world anew and those who wished to avoid the cruelty…
Fíon Spáinneach
The animosity between the smuggler Murtaí Óg Ó Súilleabháin and John Puxley, both of whom died violently in the 1750s, was once seen as symptomatic of wider societal divisions. But in fact Puxley, though employed as a revenue officer, had…
Fortune’s Fools
Romans thought the bounty the goddess Fortuna had provided would last forever, that their empire was the natural culmination of human civilisation. But their world, built on shifting climatic and epidemiological foundations, was to become a victim of its own…