Maurice Earls writes: It was reported recently in the Financial Times that the British might cut off gas supplies to Ireland this winter. And it’s not even their gas; it comes from Norway. Could you be up to them? Certainly, if Boris’s successor were to flip the Éire switch, it would be a serious…

Enda O’Doherty writes: When people choose to comment on the affairs of another country it can often be that, as they speak, they are thinking more of their own. And this may be particularly true of French comment on England. Montesquieu and Voltaire were so taken by English liberty that they appear not to have…

Maurice Earls writes: Gaelic culture and society collapsed in Ireland from the late seventeenth century on following several centuries of attack and military defeat. Ancient mores, which had acted as a force for social cohesion and comprised a complex web of energies and values that gave meaning and form to life, faded away. For the…

Those who partake in ‘decommemorating’, in the form of pulling down statues or otherwise, frequently see themselves as agents of oblivion, determined to efface an undesirable memory. But in the very act of calling attention to an offensive monument, they are in effect agents of memory, unwittingly reviving remembrance of the memorial they seek to supplant.

Enda O’Doherty writes: Many of us may be aware of the rather disparaging remark Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson – a highly educated scholar himself ‑ made on the extent of the Bard’s classical knowledge: “And though thou hadst small Latine, and less Greeke …” This was often interpreted to mean that Shakespeare had…