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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The Chocolate Port

São Salvador da Bahia lies thirteen degrees south of the equator on the southernmost tip of a small triangular peninsula, which separates the Bay of All Saints from the Atlantic Ocean. It began as a fortress on a steep hill and became Brazil’s colonial capital, exporting dye woods, animal skins and gold to Portugal. The […]

Problems, problems

One of the main reasons why both philosophy and literature have a much more significant relationship with their heritage than subjects like physics or maths is because their canonical texts – the works of Plato, or Descartes or Kant, or Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ or Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ ‑ are not rendered philosophically or imaginatively superfluous as a consequence of the passage of time.

Words from the People

An Irish Folklore Treasury: A Selection of Old Stories, Ways and Wisdom from the Schools’ Collection, by John Creedon, Gill Books, 312 pp, €24.99, ISBN: 978-0717194223 The Schools’ Collection was a scheme initiated by the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1930s whereby children throughout the Irish Free State were instructed to gather lore and local […]

Out of the Doldrums

The second Irish cultural revival of the late 1950s and early ’60s

I’m Dangerous, Me

Shriver’s irritation: a pose that doesn’t add up to a set of ideas

A Surrealist’s Journey

The life and myriad achievements of scientist and artist Desmond Morris

Artistic Differences

The Fab Two: Lennon and McCarney working with and against each other

Beyond Chatter

Making sense: the ‘antiphilosophical’ philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Spreading Civilisation

Lecky, liberalism and Britain’s role as world leader

The English School

A defence of the centrality of history to  international relations