Latest Blogs
Fredric Jameson at Ninety
Fredric Jameson died on Sunday, September 22nd, a few weeks after the piece below was written. His death will be mourned, especially but not only on the left, by readers and critics far and near. For generations old and young, he was the old master, great artificer. Except for changed tenses and some few words,…
Waiting for the End
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: The best way to envisage a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is to start with a story. In September 2022, on my way to Kyiv, I was waiting on a packed platform at a Polish train station when a scuffle broke out. I was oblivious to the cause until I got…
Only Connect
Aimée Walsh writes: There are few writers whose books do that rare thing of being a cultural event that breaks beyond the literary world. Sally Rooney, whose work has become a (reluctant) emblem for millennial angst or ‘sad girl lit’, is a writer who does just that. Her books span the cleft between commercial fiction…
The Invisible Heart
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: In an interview with Jody Randolph-Allen some thirty years ago, Eavan Boland suggested that the “project in the nature poem is a revised way of seeing, rather than the thing that’s seen”. The nature writer, by extension, might be thought of as a figure who contributes clarity and freshness, new complexities, to…
Doctor and Humanist
Kieran Murphy writes: How will you ever know someone else? The cask that houses their brain may be familiar to you, but their consciousness and preoccupations will always only be glimpsed. Their nuances, doubts, and ambitions will never be transparent. In 1986, when I was an intern at Jervis Street hospital in Dublin, Eoin O’Brien…
Down Among the Dead Files
Sean Byrne writes: On a wet and windy October morning in 1975 I presented myself, as instructed in a letter from the Civil Service Commission, at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to begin work as an Administrative Officer. The main operations of the Department were then in the GPO and the offices were entered…
Gerald Dawe: 1952-2024
Katrina Goldstone writes: A month and a half before he died, I wrote to my friend the poet Gerry Dawe proposing we do a book together. A few times over our nearly thirty-year friendship, we’d talked about joint projects where our interests intersected. But it never happened, probably because Gerry was so prolific and disciplined…
The Strasbourg Case
Michael Lillis writes: In the summer of 1972 I was transferred from the Irish embassy in Franco’s Madrid, where I had served as a Third Secretary (the lowest form of diplomatic life) for four years, to the Department’s headquarters in Dublin and assigned to its new Anglo-Irish Division, which was dealing with the crisis in…
Father’s Day
Dermot Hodson writes: Of the dark past A child is born; With joy and grief My heart is torn. Written on the occasions of his grandson’s birth in February 1932 and his father’s death two months earlier, the opening lines of James Joyce’s poem ‘Ecce Puer’ are among the author’s most personal. The strained…
A Visit to the Deathhouse
Enda O’Doherty writes: Zadie Smith, in a NYRB review back in 2008 of a biographical essay on Franz Kafka by Louis Begley, made the to my mind somewhat unlikely connection between the (apparently) tortured Prague fabulist and the merely grumpy Hull librarian Philip Larkin. But while the comparison may not work across all departments,…
Exporting the Poor
Sean Byrne writes: As one of the Commissioners on Mother and Baby Homes, Professor Mary Daly, is a very distinguished historian, it is surprising that the consigning of so many single mothers to Mother and Baby Homes is not linked to Ireland’s economic underdevelopment from Independence to the 1960s. The report points out that Mother…
Find the Author
Hiram Morgan writes: Manuscripts are the principal key to studying the history of England’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the Irish State Papers held in the UK National Archives at Kew in London as well as several other collections in public and private archives. One of the…