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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Irish Literature

A Jewish Patriot

An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce’s Dublin, and Ulysses: The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman, by Neil R Davison, University Press of Florida, 173 pp, $85, ISBN: 978-0813069555 Albert Altman (1853-1903) was born in what he called ‘Prussian Poland’ (probably the Duchy of Posen, which had a large Jewish population) and came to Ireland most […]

The World’s Doubleness

From the natural world to the grit and banality of everyday life

Against Mystique

National character: English decorum versus dreamy Celtic fecklessness

Witness to Revival

Mary Colum’s memoir of Ireland, literary revival and modernism

Comings and Goings

The ‘isolated and outlandish’ domain of the doomed Big House gentry

A Righteous Flame

A gift for evoking simple things: light, heat, water, air; food and drink

Design and Build

Scenes of fleeting beauty captured in overlooked and unglamorous contexts

Boarding School Odyssey

Poems of youth recollected. informed by humour yet speaking of heartbreak

A Grand Passion

Nora Barnacle’s life with ‘an envious, proud, lonely, discontented man’

Join the Queue

A fictional exploration of ideas pushed to their logical conclusion