Latest Blogs

Oh Brave New World!

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Rebecca Solnit remembers a time when the paper was delivered in the morning, you went to the pictures to see a film and Mom always had something good cooking in the kitchen.
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Take My Advice

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Democracy and debate are all very well – in their place. But sometimes we should surely just listen to the advice of people who know more about these things than we do.
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The Boys in the Band

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Some people thought the guys in the group, and particularly the drummer, had no rights at all and should play what, and wherever, and for as long as they were told. But Joseph Haydn rapped his bow and stood up to them.
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Book Central

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James Moran offers his thoughts on the new Library of Birmingham, which opened earlier this month and which puts books and literary culture at the heart of England.
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In Kafka’s Deathhouse

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Franz Kafka died in an Austrian sanatorium from an incurable illness, aged forty, in 1924. Nothing could be done for him. There were some far more questionable deaths just up the road from there almost twenty years later.
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The Harvest is in

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Barra O Seaghdha considers just how easy it might have been at several steps along his ascending career path for Seamus Heaney to turn away from the past.
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Rita Thalmann 1926-2013

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Rita Thalmann, an historian born in Nuremberg who taught and published in France, was one of the last historians of Nazism to have personal experience of it in the disasters it brought on her family.
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1-9 of 694 results

  • 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.
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  • 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?
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  • 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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  • Centenary of ‘The Plough and the Stars’

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    • 1 April 2026

    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.
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  • Semantic Escalation

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    • 1 April 2026

    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.
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