Blog Articles

Almost 58 million Brazilians voted for President Jair Bolsonaro, a man who never hid his nastiness, illiberalism, backwardness and general political ignorance. There are many ways of studying ‘bolsonarismo’, but one of the simplest is just to let him and his cronies speak.

A hundred years ago this month Yeats published ‘The Second Coming’ in an American magazine. The poem, Joe Cleary argues, did not wait to reflect calmly on rupture and crisis but swallowed them hot. Art does not brood on historical events but aspires itself to be the event. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Donald Trump’s exit is gratifying. The United States will now have a president who is decent, civil and honest. However, in a political society which has never been more divided and in which citizens have this year bought 17 million guns, uniting the people will not be easy.

I have met people, including some of my friends and their teenage children, who were proud to say, after the terrorist attacks, that they were definitely ‘not Charlie’. Many indeed felt that the cartoons led to Islamophobia and were an elitist insult to an oppressed and powerless minority.

An American academic finds the people he meets abroad more interesting and more widely knowledgeable than his colleagues and peers at home.

Enough is as good as a feast. But a feast is as good as enough.

The English naturalist Gilbert White writes of the harsh January weather of 1776.

New material that sheds light on the last days of Roger Casement has been released by the National Library on open digital format.

Seamus Heaney pays tribute to a man beloved by his friends for his originality as a poet, his acuity as a critic, his probity and courage and merriment.

George Orwell taught us how to detect cant and doublespeak. He also had some views on language that would do credit to a retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published two hundred years ago today. Miss Austen couldn’t wait to try it out on the neighbours.

Two historians clash in a Belfast radio interview on the Famine. Did the British deliberately plan for genocide by 'allowing nature to run its course'?