Spurning the Dust
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J Casey, Footnote Press, 404 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-804440995 Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, by Brigitte Studer, Verso Books, 496 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-1839768019 American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, by Julia L […]
A Failure to Return
John Montague: A Poet’s Life, by Adrian Frazier, Lilliput Press, 500 pp, €24.95, ISBN: 978-1843519102 A serious biography, properly considered, is a very curious kind of book. It takes a certain nerve on the part of the author to venture on what the reader must hope will be a fair, accurate and considered account of […]
Uncanny Valley
One of the strangest things about our current moment is the seemingly abrupt right turn of the tech industry in support of the Trump administration’s authoritarian project. This is especially unsettling for Irish people, long used to being the affable middleman between a welcoming America and a more culturally inscrutable Europe. Those of us who […]
The Mysterious Alice Munro
In July 2024, three months after Alice Munro died, her daughter, Andrea Munro Skinner, published an essay in the Toronto Star, revealing that her mother’s husband and her own stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her when she was a child. Sixteen years after the abuse occurred Alice Munro was told of it. She decided […]