Latest Blogs
The Grafton Wonderland
Eoin O’Brien writes: Dublin’s Graftonia: A Very Literary Neighbourhood is the latest in a series of books by Brendan Lynch on the literary history of Dublin. It follows, in a logically progressive sequence, Parsons Bookshop: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin (2006) and Prodigals & Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin’s Baggotonia (2011). In…
The Irish Jew
Maurice Earls writes: The Irish Jew, a comedy by John MacDonagh, had numerous successful runs in Dublin in the early 1920s. It was extremely popular, with performances usually twice a night. Billed as ‘Ireland’s Greatest Comedy’ and described as ‘easily the most successful play presented on the Irish stage during the present generation’, it was…
Liberalism goes neo
John Fanning writes: Twenty years ago Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, published the bestselling How Markets Work, an extended hymn of praise to global business corporations operating under free market conditions, arguing that they were the most extraordinary instrument of economic growth and individual wealth in history. He went on…
The Poet Says No
Eve Patten writes: On December 10th, 1923, the poet WB Yeats addressed those gathered for the Nobel Prize ceremony banquet at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speaking of the honour brought to Ireland by his award for Literature, he acknowledged a circle of fellow Irish writers who had worked to free their country from provincialism…
From Page to Stage
Enda O’Doherty writes: John Fleming has contributed pieces to the Dublin Review of Books over a good number of years: essays, book reviews, blog posts occasioned by the deaths of friends or admired figures in the music world. A few extracts may give the flavour of the Fleming prose style and the nature of his…
The Dark Side – 50 Years On
Martin Tyrrell writes: Half a century has passed since Pink Floyd released their game-changing album The Dark Side of the Moon. I first caught up with it some five years after the event, by which time it was already deeply unfashionable. Pink Floyd were the definitive progressive rock band – arthouse film soundtracks, an abortive…
Dunsany’s Careless Abundance
Robin Wilkinson writes: Whenever I came over from London to visit my cousins in Co Meath, long before the M3 cut a swathe through the Boyne Valley, I’d catch the Dublin to Kells bus and have the driver let me off at the turning to Tara. That meant moving up to the front at Ross…
As the Path Continues
Dr Struan Kennedy writes: This year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement which formally ended thirty years of the conflict known as the Troubles. Naturally there has been a series of events commemorating this significant milestone which have, just as understandably, celebrated the achievements of those involved in bringing…
Response to Maurice Earls
John Fanning writes: Maurice Earls’s thought-provoking essay ‘The State Of Us’ (February drb) is a valuable contribution to a much-needed debate on our future direction at a time when the world is drifting unsteadily towards an as yet unknown destination. The fall-out from the 2008 great recession is still reverberating and has been further complicated…
The Wars on Palestine
On May 22nd last, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University gave a talk at Maynooth University (and at Trinity College the next day) entitled ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’. Khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is a highly distinguished historian of the Middle East, with many books to…
An Unconsummated Affair
James Williams writes: The novelist Evelyn Waugh was perhaps the best known of the fugitives seeking shelter in Ireland from the socialist storm brought about by the election of a Labour government in Britain in 1945. Fresh from the popular and financial success of his threnody for the Anglo-Catholic aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was violently…
Victoria Amelina 1986-2023
Lia Mills writes: Victoria Amelina had a way of walking straight into your heart and making herself at home there. She had no time to waste; she was easy to love. Living the dangerous life of a war crimes researcher, gathering testimony from survivors of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and using her considerable intellectual and…