Aimée Walsh writes: There are few writers whose books do that rare thing of being a cultural event that breaks beyond the literary world. Sally Rooney, whose work has become a (reluctant) emblem for millennial angst or ‘sad girl lit’, is a writer who does just that. Her books span the cleft between commercial fiction…
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: In an interview with Jody Randolph-Allen some thirty years ago, Eavan Boland suggested that the “project in the nature poem is a revised way of seeing, rather than the thing that’s seen”. The nature writer, by extension, might be thought of as a figure who contributes clarity and freshness, new complexities, to…
Kieran Murphy writes: How will you ever know someone else? The cask that houses their brain may be familiar to you, but their consciousness and preoccupations will always only be glimpsed. Their nuances, doubts, and ambitions will never be transparent. In 1986, when I was an intern at Jervis Street hospital in Dublin, Eoin O’Brien…
Sean Byrne writes: On a wet and windy October morning in 1975 I presented myself, as instructed in a letter from the Civil Service Commission, at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to begin work as an Administrative Officer. The main operations of the Department were then in the GPO and the offices were entered…
Katrina Goldstone writes: A month and a half before he died, I wrote to my friend the poet Gerry Dawe proposing we do a book together. A few times over our nearly thirty-year friendship, we’d talked about joint projects where our interests intersected. But it never happened, probably because Gerry was so prolific and disciplined…
Michael Lillis writes: In the summer of 1972 I was transferred from the Irish embassy in Franco’s Madrid, where I had served as a Third Secretary (the lowest form of diplomatic life) for four years, to the Department’s headquarters in Dublin and assigned to its new Anglo-Irish Division, which was dealing with the crisis in…
Dermot Hodson writes: Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn. Written on the occasions of his grandson’s birth in February 1932 and his father’s death two months earlier, the opening lines of James Joyce’s poem ‘Ecce Puer’ are among the author’s most personal. The strained…
Enda O’Doherty writes: Zadie Smith, in a NYRB review back in 2008 of a biographical essay on Franz Kafka by Louis Begley, made the to my mind somewhat unlikely connection between the (apparently) tortured Prague fabulist and the merely grumpy Hull librarian Philip Larkin. But while the comparison may not work across all departments,…
Sean Byrne writes: As one of the Commissioners on Mother and Baby Homes, Professor Mary Daly, is a very distinguished historian, it is surprising that the consigning of so many single mothers to Mother and Baby Homes is not linked to Ireland’s economic underdevelopment from Independence to the 1960s. The report points out that Mother…
Hiram Morgan writes: Manuscripts are the principal key to studying the history of England’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the Irish State Papers held in the UK National Archives at Kew in London as well as several other collections in public and private archives. One of the…