Enda O’Doherty writes: Ronald Blythe, who died on January 14th aged one hundred, was best known for Akenfield, his study, published in 1969, of the life, over three generations, of an English village. Akenfield became an instant classic and was made into a film by Sir Peter Hall. The place Akenfield did not actually exist…
Peter Sirr writes: Sir John Perrott decides to make a circuit of the walls of the city. It is 1585, he is the lord deputy of Ireland and thought to be a son of Henry VIII. In seven years’ time he will die in the Tower of London, convicted of treason. Fifteen years earlier he…
The presidential, and subsequent legislative, elections in France earlier this year told us a number of things about the changing nature of the nation’s politics. First, that the main contest is now, and has been since 2017, not that between left and right but that between centre and far right
Brian M Walker writes: The recent TG4 documentary Marú in Iarthar Chorcaí (shown on December 7th) looked at the killings of thirteen civilians which occurred in West Cork in April 1922. The fact that all the victims were Protestant has drawn special attention to these events. The programme highlighted the controversy over the deaths. We…
A decade ago, Zakhar Prilepin was a Russian extremist, and the political party he belonged to was banned. These days he is the mainstream. Prilepin has not changed. Vladimir Putin has. When Putin’s pet project, the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, was bombed and partially destroyed in October, the Russian political hardliner and Ukraine…
They are described by their shadows. Brian O’Doherty on Edward Hopper With the death in New York of the Irish-American artist, writer and critic Brian O’Doherty, on November 7th, it can be said of the Irish literary landscape that another oak has fallen. This was the description of the passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013,…
To understand the seriousness of the recent anti-government protests in Prague, one needs to rewind a bit. It’s been nearly a year since the billionaire Andrej Babiš and his party, the Dissatisfied Citizens’ Action (ANO), lost the Czech parliamentary elections. Together with his coalition partner, the Social Democrats (ČSSD), Babiš was defeated (just barely) by…
In his memoir My Mother-City the poet Gerald Dawe writes of mid-twentieth century Belfast’s pervasive Calvinist atmosphere, which lasted well into the 1960s. It’s a portrayal of pre-Troubles Belfast which has become familiar, a place Caroline Blackwood depicted as smothering its inhabitants with “the gloom of her industrialised provinciality, by her backwaterishness, her bigotry and…
Javier Marías, who died on Sunday in Madrid from pneumonia, contracted after a bout of Covid, was probably the Spanish writer best-known outside his native country. His work ‑ sixteen novels as well as many volumes of short stories and essays – was translated into more than forty languages. In English translation he may…
Maurice Earls writes: Following the Treaty of Limerick, Ireland’s capacity to put an army on the field capable of defeating the English ended. For some time, there was hope that Catholic Europe would provide such an army. That turned out to be a vain hope. Irish political culture has been shaped ever since by this…