Rational Creatures
Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson, John Murray, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1529369991 In mid-eighteenth-century England, a group of literary women emerged who presented the society of their time with the possibility of the existence of something new – ‘a socially acceptable intelligent woman’. Susannah Gibson’s engaging new work, Bluestockings, The First Women’s […]
The Tale of a Tiger
Ireland’s Long Economic Boom: The Celtic Tiger Economy, 1986-2007, by Eoin O’Malley, Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp, €53.49 and Open Access, ISBN: 978-3031530692 This book by economist Eoin O’Malley is an excellent, analytical study of the reasons why Ireland, one of the poorest economies in Europe, was transformed within a relatively short period into one […]
Whatever you say, say nothing
Micheál Martin has accused the anti-NATO lobby of consistently claiming that Ireland faces the threat of membership of a military alliance, conscription into a European army, and even the presence of ‘NATO tanks in O’Connell Street’. In the Dáil, Bríd Smith asked Martin did he want to send the sons and daughters of ‘mostly working […]
A Progressive Abroad
Why did the Kilkenny-born writer Francis Hackett emigrate so soon after finishing his secondary education at Clongowes in 1900? Why did he not go on to UCD? Why, despite working briefly for the leading Irish-American figure, lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn, did he not settle into the Irish-American cultural milieu like his […]
Witness for the Prosecution
The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick, Verso, 265 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1788735506 In a TLS podcast in March 2021 the reviewers Thea Lenarduzzi, Lucy Dallas and novelist Claire Lowdon tried to puzzle out why eighty-something-year-old Vivian Gornick was ‘having a moment’. None could fully account for whey the critic, essayist and memoirist was […]
The Causes of Quarrels
There are fascinating parallels between Anna Parnell’s The Tale of a Great Sham and Andrew J Kettle’s The Material for Victory – two recently republished memoirs of key protagonists in Ireland’s Land War of 1879-1882. Both accounts contain unvarnished critiques of shortcomings of the Land League movement, revolving mainly around failures of leadership and execution […]
Beyond Revisionism
In a recent interview with The Irish Times, Roy Foster volunteered a striking comment: ‘The whole revisionism thing,’ he asserted, ‘is over.’ The remark is notable because, perhaps more than any other Irish historian of his generation, Foster built his reputation on a commitment to revisionism. Now that the outlook is avowedly a thing of […]
The Third Man
The Material for Victory: The Memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle, Laurence J Kettle (ed), introduction and additional biographical note by Niamh Reilly and annotations by Niamh Reilly and Jane O’Brien, The Open Press at the University of Galway, 300 pp, €20, ISBN: 978-1911690146 (paperback), 978-1911690153 (ebook) Andrew J Kettle (1833 – 1916) can lay just […]
Pétain’s Gift
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, by Julian Jackson, Allen Lane, 445 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241450253 The essence of a nation is that all the individuals constituting it will have many things in common; and also that they will all have forgotten many things. Ernest Renan On August 25th, 1944, four years and […]
Endgame in Paris
On February 13th 1936, the French socialist leader Léon Blum left the Palais Bourbon in Paris, the site of the lower house of parliament, to travel the relatively short distance to his home on the île Saint-Louis. He was driven by Georges Monnet, a friend and colleague, and they were accompanied by Monnet’s wife, Germaine. […]