I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

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Biography

A Life of Journeys

Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, by Peter Brown, Princeton University Press, 736 pp, £38, ISBN: 978-0691242286 As a young boy growing up in the 1930s in a Dublin Protestant family, Peter Brown could have been personally acquainted with the unblessed coupling of politics with religion long before he wrote about its presence […]

Anyone for Tennis?

An engaging and self-deprecating meditation on getting on

A Voracious Reader

Peering into Stalin’s soul from the scribbles in the margins of his books

A German Requiem

Fashion model, rocker, poet, addict: the strange life of the singer Nico

Hugging Stalin

Growing up under, and then losing, the certainty that socialism will win

Are We Civilised at All?

Fintan O’Toole’s personal narrative of Ireland’s ‘ascent to normality’

The Reunion

Leonard Cohen’s fusion of sacred and profane, of words and music

In That Dawn

The carefree days before Belfast became the capital of the Troubles

Skydiving

A poetic auto-fiction on migration, trauma and shifting identities

Urban Shock

A moving meditation on a working class past from a London-Irish historian