Latest Blogs
Still No Reckoning
The sentencing of Radovan Karadžic for crimes including ordering the Srebrenica massacre has been greeted as a cause of satisfaction. But what about all the other preceding massacres? When, asks Ed Vulliamy, will we see justice dispensed for them?
Ireland And Antisemitism
English Catholic writers like GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were very popular in Irish schools in the last century, Chesterton’s prediction of the demise of Protestantism being particularly valued. But their entrenched antisemitism, or indeed any antisemitism, found very few takers in Ireland.
We’re all in this together
A conference to be held in Poland this autumn will consider the idea of solidarity, and by implication its current relative absence in Europe. Are there limits to how much solidarity can realistically be expected? Can we bring it back, or will ‘national egotism’ triumph?
Nine Years of the Dublin Review of Books
Happy birthday to us as we enter our tenth year. The drb first appeared on St Patrick’s Day 2007.
Adrian Hardiman 1951-2016
We mourn the death of Adrian Hardiman, a powerful intellect, an advocate of civil liberties and a contributor to the Dublin Review of Books.
Mothers and Fathers
Creative writers would seem to be well equipped to muse on certain lives they cannot have known. And why not the mysterious lives of their own parents, or that portion of those lives which occurred before the writing offspring were even born?
Swings and Roundabouts
A squabble between servants in a Dublin house, which led to one of them being ‘let go’, ended up in court when the parlourmaid Rosa McCabe alleged that she had been fired after being wrongly accused of voicing pro-German sentiments.
No Europe Please
The British intellectual review ‘Encounter’ shared a common source of funding with several European cousins and it was pleased to open its columns to their writers – as long as they didn’t bang on about Europe.
Back to the Eighties
There has been a justified focus on the recent rise of illiberal sentiments in central Europe, though the region is scarcely unique in harbouring xenophobic ideas. Yet these are countries with considerable intellectual potential and it is there surely that hope lies.
1916 Talks
Social and political life, Pearse’s St Enda’s, the role of women and the part played by Dublin Protestants in the Rising are the subjects of four free lunchtime talks in Dublin in February and March.
Umberto Eco: 1932-2016
The eminent Italian novelist, critic, journalist and philosopher of books and libraries has read his last. Though a preeminent man of books, he was rather relaxed about the fact that there were things he hadn’t read.
Connolly, socialism and syndicalism
Captain Jack White was a supporter of James Connolly and of his political creed of syndicalism. Was syndicalism just another type of socialism or was it something much more radical and revolutionary altoghether?