The Hungarian writer and Nobel prizewinner Imre Kertész, who has died aged eighty-six, was deported to Auschwitz aged fourteen. Pondering on that experience, and more broadly on totalitarianism, was to provide him with the material for his life’s literary work.
The sentencing of Radovan Karadžic for crimes including ordering the Srebrenica massacre has been greeted as a cause of satisfaction. But what about all the other preceding massacres? When, asks Ed Vulliamy, will we see justice dispensed for them?
English Catholic writers like GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were very popular in Irish schools in the last century, Chesterton’s prediction of the demise of Protestantism being particularly valued. But their entrenched antisemitism, or indeed any antisemitism, found very few takers in Ireland.
A conference to be held in Poland this autumn will consider the idea of solidarity, and by implication its current relative absence in Europe. Are there limits to how much solidarity can realistically be expected? Can we bring it back, or will ‘national egotism’ triumph?
Happy birthday to us as we enter our tenth year. The drb first appeared on St Patrick’s Day 2007.
We mourn the death of Adrian Hardiman, a powerful intellect, an advocate of civil liberties and a contributor to the Dublin Review of Books.
Creative writers would seem to be well equipped to muse on certain lives they cannot have known. And why not the mysterious lives of their own parents, or that portion of those lives which occurred before the writing offspring were even born?
A squabble between servants in a Dublin house, which led to one of them being ‘let go’, ended up in court when the parlourmaid Rosa McCabe alleged that she had been fired after being wrongly accused of voicing pro-German sentiments.
The British intellectual review ‘Encounter’ shared a common source of funding with several European cousins and it was pleased to open its columns to their writers – as long as they didn’t bang on about Europe.
There has been a justified focus on the recent rise of illiberal sentiments in central Europe, though the region is scarcely unique in harbouring xenophobic ideas. Yet these are countries with considerable intellectual potential and it is there surely that hope lies.