Latest Blogs
Fleeing the Russian State
Alexander Obolonsky writes: Russia has something positive to present – both to itself and to the world. Alongside the dominant culture of subjugation, an alternative counter-culture of resistance has always existed and survived, even in the darkest times.
Dropping the mask
Andy Storey writes: the old, better-managed order mourned by the writers in Foreign Affairs was no less violent and exploitative than Trump’s grotesque carnival of hustle and hubris.
Reasoning Animals
Stephen O’Neill writes: What is stopping a conversation about a United Ireland which doesn’t knowingly inhabit the same structures that it seeks to replace, or repeat the same cliches and reinscribe the same privileges that those structures have perpetuated?
The Berlin Fringe?
Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: The fiasco marring this year’s Berlin Film Festival shows once again that the most vital art does not emerge from approval but thrives on the margins. A lesson the BFF needs to (re)learn.
Evidence of fullness
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: On the evidence of his work to date, Martin Dyar might be thought of as an able, and often savagely funny, dramatist of the universal human parish.
Party Time Over?
Michael Laver writes: While ‘The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t’ by Didi Kuo adds to a burgeoning ‘decline of parties’ literature, are we to believe that this decline is part of a global pattern or more specific to the US?
Centenary of ‘The Plough and the Stars’
Bess Rowen writes: 11 February 2026 marked a century since protesters disrupted Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ by singing nationalist songs and rushing the stage.
Semantic Escalation
Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant.
A Political Exile
Thomas McCarthy writes: A poet and former director of Poetry Ireland, Theo Dorgan has already written a number of successful prose works, including ‘Voyage Home’, his marvellous logbook of an ocean voyage from Antigua to Kinsale on the seventy-foot schooner ‘Spirit of Crosshaven’.
Yes We Can
John Fanning writes: Earlier this year I saw the film ‘Mountainhead’, the new Jesse Armstrong production continuing his exposure of the rich and powerful following the success of the Murdoch family saga ‘Succession’. The characters featured are all filthy rich tech bros, some easily identified: Musk, possibly Sam Altman.
Getting in Close
Josh Abbey writes: Essays about close reading often begin with a cliche: IA Richards and his experiment. Soon the formula will include a disquisition on AI: can a large-language model close-read? I asked ChatGPT and it said ‘sort of’. So I asked CoPilot, and it said ‘Absolutely!’ It was a little shy and reticent to…
A Pinch of Salt
David Blake Knox writes: A literary storm raged during this summer. The eye of that storm could be found in the UK, but it concerned a book that has been an international multi-million bestseller. The book provided the basis of a movie that was released to critical acclaim earlier this year – with the promise…