Latest Blogs
Painting Light
Ciarán O’Rourke writes: ‘Yours is the art that conveys / what the world is made of.’ So Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin writes in ‘Instructions to an Architect’, imploring her interlocutor to ‘build me a shelter’, in anticipation of a future that seems already ‘fractured from the inside’. The poet too can redeem and repair a broken…
John Barth: 1930-2024
Kevin Power writes: It was John Barth’s achievement to become a significant figure without ever becoming a major, or even really a popular novelist. It was as if he decided, early in his career, that somebody had to be American Literature’s representative postmodernist, and that that somebody might as well be him. He filled the…
Entering the Whirlpool
David Barnes writes: Succession’s Frank Vernon likes ‘to recite Prufrock internally while we check we’re GAAP-compliant’ (Season Two, Episode Six). He goes on to suggest others ‘use whatever method you prefer to numb the pain’. GAAP are Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – principles that Waystar Royco, the corporate behemoth whose story is chronicled in HBO’s…
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…