Katja Bruisch writes: I recently completed a scholarly monograph – an environmental, economic and energy history of peat in imperial and Soviet Russia. After years of thinking and writing, I approached Cambridge University Press. CUP is a leading academic press and their series Studies in Environment and History has a high reputation in my field….
Hiram Morgan writes: In Holy Trinity, a white Moorish-style church built in the late nineteenth century overlooking the port of Algiers, there is a memorial to Devereux Spratt, the first Anglican minister to come to the great African city. Reverend Spratt didn’t however arrive of his own free will – he was a captive of…
John Fanning writes: Sarah Wynn-Williams is the latest critic and whistleblower to highlight the egregious behaviour and gross irresponsibility of the tech giants. Her book Careless People is a damning indictment of Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, one of the most profitable and powerful companies in the world. An idealistic young New Zealander working in…
Patrick Walsh writes: 1923 was a significant year in the life of Thomas Horgan of Ballynaskreena, Co Kerry. His youngest surviving daughter, Bridget (known as Bridie), was born, and he became the first of his family to own his farm as the title of the land his ancestors had farmed for many generations was transferred…
Brian M Walker writes: There is at present much interest in the Irish diaspora, with television programmes on the subject and a new five-year strategy planned by the government. Thirty years ago President Mary Robinson delivered her groundbreaking address on the Irish diaspora to the joint houses of the Oireachtas. She reminded us of the…
Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: There is an urgent need for the US to evaluate the consequences of the full-scale assault on its democracy. One way to begin is to examine the alarming parallels in the US now with one of the most horrific periods of human history. Thirty years ago, in June 1995, Italian critic Umberto…
Fergus O’Ferrall writes: This year (and this day, August 6th) marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the founding father of Irish democracy. The remarkable set of political principles enunciated by O’Connell, by which he sought to shape early Irish democratic practice, retain seminal significance for our democratic future in the twenty-first…
David O’Connor writes: The titles of Adrian Duncan’s novels tend to refer to work. Place of, time off, profession. Love Notes From a German Building Site; A Sabbatical in Leipzig; The Geometer Lobachevsky. Not so the recently published The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth – though it is, in the first of its two parts,…
Drew Basile writes: Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that ‘the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera’. If photographs capture life, Sontag warns that they also flatten it. Mundane details transform into nuanced objects of aesthetic contemplation, but the real…
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: Writing mainly of animals and artefacts, local history and local weather, Moya Cannon may nevertheless be ranked among the great love poets of this island. Her work expresses kinship with a world it feels impelled to examine in detail, embodying, in its limpid, exploring flow, an openness to manifold life –…