Latest Blogs

The Year Without Summer

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The eruption of a volcano on an Indonesian island in April 1815 – the most explosive such event in history – had long-lasting and devastating effects across the globe. It is the subject of a conference in Galway this weekend.
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Kathmandu Letter

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Public interest defender ‘LB Thapa’ can no longer practise the law. Subjected to death threats, he now lives anonymously with his family in poor conditions, but this is scarcely unusual, he says, for Nepalese lawyers who won’t lie.
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Under The Weather

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So, it’s autumn. No need to be depressed. There are apples, blackberries, damsons and bright, golden woodlands to be enjoyed for a few months yet before winter draws in.
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A Personal Vendetta

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Thomas Dickson, one of three men murdered in 1916 by the possibly deranged Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, has been accused of editing an anti-Semitic Irish newspaper. The paper, ‘The Eye-Opener’, may have been scurrilous, but it is doubtful if it was anti-Semitic.
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The Fog Persists

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A week has passed and we are no wiser about who exactly was behind Turkey’s attempted coup. This is scarcely surprising as we still don’t know who was behind the country’s previous coups either. One thing, however, is certain: President Erdoğan will use it to further entrench his power.
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If You Liked This …

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The digital revolution has undoubtedly brought us many benefits and made a lot of things easier, but that does not mean that we should welcome what it has delivered in its more recent phases, or what it might have in store for us in the future.
Read More If You Liked This …

Lost without eu

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One can strike off on one’s own of course, off into the North Atlantic if one wants, but what is one leaving behind? And will it eventually appear that there are a few bits missing here and there?
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Flattering the People

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Many British and Irish commentators have commented on the rancorous and perhaps deluded mood of large sections the British electorate. But some prefer to turn their fire on the educated and the cosmopolitan, guilty, it seems, of gross sins of contempt and condescension.
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Au Revoir, Europe

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Internationalist British journalist, sixtysomething but not a bad catch, seeks Polish, Italian, French or Irish woman with intellectual interests for quick marriage and happiness ever after in the European dolce vita.
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Ideal Homes

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A distant prospect of a life of ease in the Big House is intoxicating to many. Nevertheless, not everything is necessarily as wonderful as it seems and the servants in particular can be a frightful problem.
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  • Selling one’s soul and saving it

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    • 1 June 2026

    Raymond Geuss writes: Marx is generally considered to be a thinker who had little time for the spiritual dimension of human life. This is correct if the spiritual life is understood as depending on reference to theological or transhuman entities or to metaphysical properties.
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  • Michael D’s Memory

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    • 1 June 2026

    Liam Kennedy writes: Sociologists, unlike historians, have long memories. My evidence for this – historians like evidence – is a sample of one, the former president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.
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  • For the Little People

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    • 29 April 2026

    Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.
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  • Fleeing the Russian State

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    • 29 April 2026

    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.
    Read More
  • Dropping the mask

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    • 29 April 2026

    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.
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  • Reasoning Animals

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    • 29 April 2026

    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?
    Read More
  • The Berlin Fringe?

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    • 29 April 2026

    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.
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  • Evidence of fullness

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    • 1 April 2026

    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.
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  • Party Time Over?

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    • 1 April 2026

    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?
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