From Romance to Regret
The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, by Mateo Jarquin, The University of North Carolina Press, 336 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 978-1469678498 Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War, by Eline Van Ommen, University of California Press, 312 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0520390768 Sandinistas: A Moral History, by Robert J Sierakowski, University […]
It’s My Party
On the wall near my home in Berlin, someone has sprayed a thoughtful observation: ‘Machen ist wie wollen, nur krasser’ – Doing is like wanting, just crazier. That could be the new political motto of Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most polarising politician of the left. Wagenknecht entered politics in 1990 and now, at fifty-five, is German […]
Getting Away
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane, 384 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241540510 ‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just […]
The Gunman’s Shadow
On January 7th, 1922, at the end of thirteen days of extraordinary debate about whether to endorse the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Dáil Éireann voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to do so. Éamon de Valera, president of the Irish Republic, who had led the arguments against it, said: I would like my last word here to be […]
Am I an illusion?
Every day we hear the use of the vocabulary of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ without investigating what is meant by the term. For example, we might enjoy the compliment ‘love yourself’. Or we may well undergo embarrassment if a friend says ‘take responsibility for yourself’. Sometimes it is said by way of affront, ‘don’t take […]
Keynes in Dublin
I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect Free Trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. These are the opening words of a lecture delivered by the economist John Maynard Keynes in Dublin in April 1933. […]
My Name Is James …
James, by Percival Everett, Doubleday, 320 pp, $28, ISBN: 978-0385550369 In a scene from the film American Fiction, Monk Ellison, a frustrated writer who can’t find a publisher for his next novel because it isn’t ‘black enough’, is told by his agent that his dashed-off pseudonymous satire My Pafology – deliberately written to mock the […]
Rational Creatures
Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson, John Murray, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1529369991 In mid-eighteenth-century England, a group of literary women emerged who presented the society of their time with the possibility of the existence of something new – ‘a socially acceptable intelligent woman’. Susannah Gibson’s engaging new work, Bluestockings, The First Women’s […]
The Tale of a Tiger
Ireland’s Long Economic Boom: The Celtic Tiger Economy, 1986-2007, by Eoin O’Malley, Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp, €53.49 and Open Access, ISBN: 978-3031530692 This book by economist Eoin O’Malley is an excellent, analytical study of the reasons why Ireland, one of the poorest economies in Europe, was transformed within a relatively short period into one […]
Whatever you say, say nothing
Micheál Martin has accused the anti-NATO lobby of consistently claiming that Ireland faces the threat of membership of a military alliance, conscription into a European army, and even the presence of ‘NATO tanks in O’Connell Street’. In the Dáil, Bríd Smith asked Martin did he want to send the sons and daughters of ‘mostly working […]