Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Wordplay
It’s not easy being in a Joanna Walsh story. Nothing is quite as it should be and however fervently you maintain hope, that vision you have of how life might approach perfection ‑ the image imagined ‑ never settles or…
Troubles with Remembering; or, The Seven Sins of Memory Studies
Historians often talk about memory, while actually writing in looser terms about history. There is also a prevalent tendency to confuse memory with historiography, which bolsters a delusional self-image of the professional historian as the primary custodian of communal memory.
Joe’s Golden Years
Salman Rushdie’s new novel is set in an America switching from Obama to Trump. While it may not be entirely clear what he is telling us about the ‘post-truth’ world, Rushdie’s primary gift as a storyteller seems to have survived…
Meet the Replicants
Research, backed by large financial investment, is forging ahead to turn fiction into fact and reproduce human intelligence in androids that approximate to humans. What effect might these efforts, if successful, have on how we perceive and value our own…
With Karl and Groucho
Augustus Young’s imagined conversations between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, taking the form of a Socratic dialogue, range across the role of ideas in art, public versus private, the role of the audience, love, happiness, knowledge, Marx (Karl and Groucho)…
In the Mix
A new study of the traditional music of Co Clare employs an approach which highlights the fluidity and play between periphery and centre, between the dynamic of flow and the rootedness of place, between past and future, music as heritage…
The Rock in Rough Weather
Those who still see a future for Irish Catholicism argue that in a materialist and individualistic age it can minister to ‘a deep spiritual hunger’. But there is little evidence that Catholics see church teachings as a means of living…
The Book’s The Thing
A new study of reading in the eighteenth century returns books to the settings in which they were enjoyed, stressing how they were valued as aids to refinement and self-improvement and how frequently they were encountered through being read aloud…
The Green Island
A valuable study of the treatment of Ireland in sections of the German print media shows an evolution from a reliance on a jumble of cliches about the nation – often of English provenance – to a more informed engagement,…
Slaves to a Myth
The notion that large numbers of Irish immigrants were once slaves has been mobilised by the American alt-right to deflect from historical and contemporary racism while simultaneously promoting a white nationalist agenda based on claims of white victimhood.
Team Amis
To be accepted into Martin Amis’s canon of greats you must be a writer, not necessarily of brilliant novels, or even of brilliant chapters, but of brilliant sentences and paragraphs. Plot, form, structure, psychological insight: all of these are secondary…
Part of What They Are
Driven by its history, Britain is hurtling towards a hard Brexit, which is likely to be a quite unpleasant experience for our neighbours, and perhaps to some degree also for us. Unless, that is, a coalition of pragmatists emerges in…