Then Again, Pat Boran
In a poem about O’Connell Street’s Spire, the monument becomes a dagger, a skewer, an extended middle finger. None of the names are inclusive of us, the citizens; the Spire is the ‘we’ reduced to ‘I’, which might be seen as the opposite of Boran’s project, to expand the ‘I’ to ‘we’.
Among the Dead Men
JG Farrell had a curiosity that spanned various cultures and periods, a wicked sense of fun, a keen, unrelenting eye for the hypocrisy of particularly English manners of discourse and an understanding of the military and class basis of imperial self-belief.
Stranger Danger
Stoker’s Count Dracula and Joyce’s Lipoti Virag are both dangerous intruders, the former threatening to infect the English with vampirism, the latter subverting the Irish moral order. Both writers were engaging with a contemporary worry about Eastern European immigration.
On the Waves of the Surreal
Some Irish modernists – Flann O’Brien most obviously – have incorporated surreal elements in their fiction. The tradition has recently received a boost through the work of the Moscow-born and Dublin-based writer, editor, translator and publisher, Anatoly Kudryavitsky.
Betrayal
We should be sceptical when great powers tell us a region is riven by age-old, unresolvable conflicts and hatreds. This was the kind of mystification that in 1938 supplied Britain and France with an excuse to abandon their ally Czechoslovakia, a European democracy, to Hitler.
Turn On, Tune In, Help Out
The aim of any left-wing project worth its name surely has to be human emancipation. Perhaps the real strength of Corbynism might turn out to be its ability to incubate a new radical political culture rather than discovering a new form of economics.
Life, Death, Clean Water
By the 1990s, seven prose works by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabó had appeared in French, ten in Czech and seventeen in German, while there are now more translations in Italian even than in English. How does this neglect impinge on our notions of the universality of literature?
No Homes To Go To
In a situation where housing has been ‘commodified’ and has become more an investment good than a form of shelter or a human right, unless the state takes on a strong management role the prospect of owning one’s own home will soon for many people be just a distant dream.
A Novel Enterprise
Daniel Defoe was a prolific journalist, producing no fewer than 560 journals, tracts and books yet somehow always in debt. His various schemes included attempts to sell marine insurance and to breed civet cats – and the writing of what we might consider the first novel in English.
Protestant and Irish
Three historians discuss issues raised by a new anthology outlining the varieties of Protestant experience in independent Ireland. Topics touched upon include religious segregation in education, privileged access to employment, and its disappearance, and national feeling.