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…
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: ‘Yours is the art that conveys / what the world is made of.’ So Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin writes in ‘Instructions to an Architect’, imploring her interlocutor to ‘build me a shelter’, in anticipation of a future that seems already ‘fractured from the inside’. The poet too can redeem and repair a broken…
Kevin Power writes: It was John Barth’s achievement to become a significant figure without ever becoming a major, or even really a popular novelist. It was as if he decided, early in his career, that somebody had to be American Literature’s representative postmodernist, and that that somebody might as well be him. He filled the…
David Barnes writes: Succession’s Frank Vernon likes ‘to recite Prufrock internally while we check we’re GAAP-compliant’ (Season Two, Episode Six). He goes on to suggest others ‘use whatever method you prefer to numb the pain’. GAAP are Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – principles that Waystar Royco, the corporate behemoth whose story is chronicled in HBO’s…
Eoin O’Brien writes: Dublin’s Graftonia: A Very Literary Neighbourhood is the latest in a series of books by Brendan Lynch on the literary history of Dublin. It follows, in a logically progressive sequence, Parsons Bookshop: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin (2006) and Prodigals & Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin’s Baggotonia (2011). In…
Maurice Earls writes: The Irish Jew, a comedy by John MacDonagh, had numerous successful runs in Dublin in the early 1920s. It was extremely popular, with performances usually twice a night. Billed as ‘Ireland’s Greatest Comedy’ and described as ‘easily the most successful play presented on the Irish stage during the present generation’, it was…