Rule by Kindness

A Progressive Abroad

When Everything Seemed Possible

Englands, My Englands

Good Things

Reading the cookbook as an instance of self-expression and social display.

Before the Deluge

A classic account of the life of a working class Parisian street

History from the top II

Amid the consensus about Ireland being a victim of politicians, bankers and out-of-control developers, is it right to forget the additional uncomfortable fact that large…

History from the Top

An account of Irish history whose gaze is fixed on intellectual or elite culture and does not engage with whole areas of the existence of…

The Master and his Men

Conor Cruise O’Brien went off the rails towards the end of his career, adopting increasingly bizarre positions on Northern Ireland and uncritically supporting Israel. Few…

Mapping the Revival

A handsome new publication provides a survey of that period of ferment and rejuvenation that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘fashioned a…

Big Picture History

A new study examines Ireland from medieval times in the context of social organisation, how surplus wealth is created and deployed, how literacy affects authority…

The Harvest In

Seamus Heaney’s conception of poetry meant he had to trust that his disciplined tending of the ground would lead to harvest, that if the writing…

Problematising Undecidability

The transferability of postmodern discourse, and its endless repetition over recent decades in academic essays, papers, dissertations, articles, talks and books, throws its usefulness into…

A Gift of Tongues

With so little available for the general reader on Irish literary culture between 600 and 1600, in either Irish or English, we have to wonder…

New Irelands

French Catholic culture offered a supplementary world, and in some cases a focus for unfulfilled longings, for those who found Free State culture insufficient or…

The Harvest In

O’Driscoll raises the matter of the many conferences, launches, conferrings and other public events in which Heaney participates. “Ongoing civic service, I suppose,” Heaney responds…

The Phantom of Exclusion

The Irish Literary Revival, alongside many other similar movements of the time, was an attempt to transform Ireland from what it seemed to be becoming…

Silent Symphony

Just Like That

A Sentimental Dissenter