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.

Irish Literature

Ancestral Vices

Soldier, Sailor: An Intimate Portrait of an Irish Family, by Eliza Pakenham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 312 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-0297843771 Soldier Sailor has many charms. It’s a clever concept – a young member of a well-known Anglo-Irish family wishes to find out who the subjects of the oil paintings on the walls of the dining room […]