Latest Blogs
Tom Stoppard: 1937-2025
Alena Dvořáková writes: Writing means turning things into words. But when is it too soon to turn people into words? When the dead are prolific, hugely successful writers, this worry is easier to dismiss. After all, they have made a lifetime career out of turning things as well as people into words incessantly, obsessively and,…
A Troubled Shore
David Alvey writes: Some books become more relevant with the passage of time. Dervla Murphy’s A Month by the Sea, which relates the author’s experiences in Gaza during the month of June 2011, when she was eighty years old, is such a book. Her visit took place less than half a year after Israel’s twenty-two-day…
Move over for AI
Katja Bruisch writes: I recently completed a scholarly monograph – an environmental, economic and energy history of peat in imperial and Soviet Russia. After years of thinking and writing, I approached Cambridge University Press. CUP is a leading academic press and their series Studies in Environment and History has a high reputation in my field….
To Algiers and Back
Hiram Morgan writes: In Holy Trinity, a white Moorish-style church built in the late nineteenth century overlooking the port of Algiers, there is a memorial to Devereux Spratt, the first Anglican minister to come to the great African city. Reverend Spratt didn’t however arrive of his own free will – he was a captive of…
Tech’s False Promise
John Fanning writes: Sarah Wynn-Williams is the latest critic and whistleblower to highlight the egregious behaviour and gross irresponsibility of the tech giants. Her book Careless People is a damning indictment of Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, one of the most profitable and powerful companies in the world. An idealistic young New Zealander working in…
TCD’s Forgotten Tenantry
Patrick Walsh writes: 1923 was a significant year in the life of Thomas Horgan of Ballynaskreena, Co Kerry. His youngest surviving daughter, Bridget (known as Bridie), was born, and he became the first of his family to own his farm as the title of the land his ancestors had farmed for many generations was transferred…
Which Irish are You?
Brian M Walker writes: There is at present much interest in the Irish diaspora, with television programmes on the subject and a new five-year strategy planned by the government. Thirty years ago President Mary Robinson delivered her groundbreaking address on the Irish diaspora to the joint houses of the Oireachtas. She reminded us of the…
Eco and ‘American fascism’
Maurice Fitzpatrick writes: There is an urgent need for the US to evaluate the consequences of the full-scale assault on its democracy. One way to begin is to examine the alarming parallels in the US now with one of the most horrific periods of human history. Thirty years ago, in June 1995, Italian critic Umberto…
Prophet of a Coming Time
Fergus O’Ferrall writes: This year (and this day, August 6th) marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, the founding father of Irish democracy. The remarkable set of political principles enunciated by O’Connell, by which he sought to shape early Irish democratic practice, retain seminal significance for our democratic future in the twenty-first…
To the Edge
David O’Connor writes: The titles of Adrian Duncan’s novels tend to refer to work. Place of, time off, profession. Love Notes From a German Building Site; A Sabbatical in Leipzig; The Geometer Lobachevsky. Not so the recently published The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth – though it is, in the first of its two parts,…
Picture Perfect
Drew Basile writes: Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that ‘the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera’. If photographs capture life, Sontag warns that they also flatten it. Mundane details transform into nuanced objects of aesthetic contemplation, but the real…
Inscribing Time
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: Writing mainly of animals and artefacts, local history and local weather, Moya Cannon may nevertheless be ranked among the great love poets of this island. Her work expresses kinship with a world it feels impelled to examine in detail, embodying, in its limpid, exploring flow, an openness to manifold life –…