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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Ideas

It’s Not All Bad

Term report: wealth, good; population, v. good; equality, could do better

An Teanga on Tour

Gaelic Ireland’s many encounters with continental European culture

This Happy Breed

Multiple British fractures leave England alone to feast on its past

Yes We Can

An argument against pessimism and in support of deep human potential

Barefoot Kings?

Sifting the evidence on civilisation in Gaelic Ulster

Can history save us?

The need for global preparedness before the next pandemic arrives

The Inflection Point

Literacy in religious thinking may be necessary to tackle the world crisis

Walking the Wild Side

Wintering out in Mayo’s lonely glens and boglands

Hail Ruritania!

A kingdom’s progress: from Duck Soup to Princess Diana

Succeeding in Solitude

In 2014, the French writer Sylvain Tesson fell some ten metres while trying to scale the side of a friend’s home. The accident not only left him with lasting physical ailments; it also transformed him from enthusiastic global tourist to philosopher and aesthete of solitude.