A new anthology of the writings of the Irish Revival demonstrates that literature is written in a context. But if the ludicrous decision to downgrade the teaching of history in secondary schools is not reversed, similar volumes in the future will be incomprehensible.
In July 1941 more than 340 Jews were beaten, humiliated and then murdered in Jedwabne in Poland by a large group of local men. Shortly afterwards the wife of one of the killers turned up to Mass wearing a fur coat that had only recently been worn to a synagogue.
The former German chancellor, who died today, was one of the major figures of the European centre left in the twentieth century. Though this centre-leftism was a different thing from Blairism, Schmidt was a tough and practical man. People who have visions should see the doctor, he thought.
The great French socialist leader Leon Blum was much hated by the extreme right in the 1930s, and largely because he was Jewish. It should also however be remembered that he was much hated by the extreme left.
In 1603, William Shakespeare was, among other things, an English dramatist. With the accession of James Stuart of Scotland to the English throne he was to have to learn to become a British one.
St Crispin’s Day, the day on which the Battle of Agincourt was fought six hundred years ago, was a glorious one for England. Its memory was called upon at another difficult time in the mid-twentieth century, but the Agincourt battle scenes in Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V’ were in fact filmed in Ireland.
Ireland in the early 1890s was a country in paralysis, but over the next thirty years it began to move again as ideas bubbled up and were debated in new journals, clubs and societies. A new anthology catches the cultural ferment of that era.
The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written a sharp analysis of the moral world of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, though her theories on its anonymous publication may tell us more about Ferrante’s motives than Austen’s.
According to some British commentators, it doesn’t hugely matter whether Britain is formally in or out of Europe. In reality it will always be half-in, and that suits it, and its financial sector in particular, just fine.
Exiled to the remote south by Mussolini’s fascist regime, painter, writer and medical doctor Carlo Levi found there a peasant society that had apparently remained untouched by civilisation or modernity.