In the context of the controversy over commissioning policy at the Abbey we should be reminded why theatre matters and the degree to which it is a barometer of a nation’s psychic health. Plays, musicals and other performances are manifestations of the imagination in its most live, energising and present form.
Diana Athill was a publisher’s editor who worked with some of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. She found a measure of fame at the end of her life through her wonderfully lucid and engaging memoirs, while she also fascinated with her frankness about her personal life.
Britain, it still seems likely, will soon be leaving the EU: the question is how. But what will happen after that? And is there not a form of supporting Europe and its values, for those who want to, that can be open to individuals from the UK, or Turkey, or Belarus, or indeed Russia?
Austria became a republic in late 1918, but its democracy collapsed in the 1930s. The director of Vienna’s new contemporary history museum, asked what can be learned from the First Republic, says its history teaches us that democracy is a perishable good and can be fatally weakened by a coarsening of public language.
Jeremy Corbyn, who dreams of a left-wing Brexit – a ‘Lexit’ – may not share the imperial nostalgia of the Tory Brexiters but his thinking belongs to an age when the white male working class was the basis of progressive politics. That age has passed and the history that made it possible has also gone
James Joyce’s strategy was to write as an exile from Ireland. That this exile should follow him into eternity was not part of the plan. In the early years after his death the Irish authorities displayed great hostility towards him. That has changed. Is it time to think of bringing his body home?
If politics continues on its present path discourse will become entirely populist and practice increasingly totalitarian, the charismatic leader ubiquitous, elections irregular, their outcomes predictable and the concept of society invoked only in terms of security rather than social justice.
Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s ‘The Ruin of Education in Ireland’, published in 1902, interpreted the Catholic church’s control of education as a British conspiracy to keep the Irish intellect stunted.
The Irish Party, being purely a vehicle to obtain Home Rule, was much more circumscribed than a modern political party, free to champion a diversity of issues. All its eggs were in one basket. From 1900 that gave it an appearance of intellectual jadedness and left it open to competition.
David Lynch spent five years getting Eraserhead made, from a screenplay of just twenty-one pages. One might think that only an extreme eccentric would make such efforts, but the image of Lynch as simply a kooky man is one that a new book sets out to dispel.