James Williams writes: The novelist Evelyn Waugh was perhaps the best known of the fugitives seeking shelter in Ireland from the socialist storm brought about by the election of a Labour government in Britain in 1945. Fresh from the popular and financial success of his threnody for the Anglo-Catholic aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was violently…

 Katrina Goldstone writes, In January 1987, Stella Jackson, who wrote under the pen name, Stella Fitzthomas Hagan, put a halt to her proposed memoir, declaring it unlikely she would ever manage to finish it. She had only reached the period of the late 1940s, in a life that would span from 1908 -1992. Despite her…

James Williams writes: In the years after World War Two, hundreds of thousands of Irish people migrated to Britain. In all, almost one in six of the population quit the country in the 1950s as Ireland shared with East Germany the unenviable distinction of being the only countries in Europe whose population declined over the…

Robin Wilkinson writes: When shooting In Bruges in 2008 the director did daily battle with the studio on matters from the storyboard to the lighting of individual scenes. He won that war and the resulting gem was very much his own, in every sense a Martin McDonagh film, as is The Banshees of Inisherin. Since…

A decade ago, Zakhar Prilepin was a Russian extremist, and the political party he belonged to was banned. These days he is the mainstream. Prilepin has not changed. Vladimir Putin has. When Putin’s pet project, the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, was bombed and partially destroyed in October, the Russian political hardliner and Ukraine…

They are described by their shadows. Brian O’Doherty on Edward Hopper With the death in New York of the Irish-American artist, writer and critic Brian O’Doherty, on November 7th, it can be said of the Irish literary landscape that another oak has fallen. This was the description of the passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013,…

To understand the seriousness of the recent anti-government protests in Prague, one needs to rewind a bit. It’s been nearly a year since the billionaire Andrej Babiš and his party, the Dissatisfied Citizens’ Action (ANO), lost the Czech parliamentary elections. Together with his coalition partner, the Social Democrats (ČSSD), Babiš was defeated (just barely) by…

In his memoir My Mother-City the poet Gerald Dawe writes of mid-twentieth century Belfast’s pervasive Calvinist atmosphere, which lasted well into the 1960s. It’s a portrayal of pre-Troubles Belfast which has become familiar, a place Caroline Blackwood depicted as smothering its inhabitants with “the gloom of her industrialised provinciality, by her backwaterishness, her bigotry and…

  Javier Marías, who died on Sunday in Madrid from pneumonia, contracted after a bout of Covid, was probably the Spanish writer best-known outside his native country. His work ‑ sixteen novels as well as many volumes of short stories and essays – was translated into more than forty languages. In English translation he may…

Maurice Earls writes: Following the Treaty of Limerick, Ireland’s capacity to put an army on the field capable of defeating the English ended. For some time, there was hope that Catholic Europe would provide such an army. That turned out to be a vain hope. Irish political culture has been shaped ever since by this…