Ideas

Diversifying the Horizon

Complementing science with tribal strategies for human survival

Ideas

Yes We Can

An argument against pessimism and in support of deep human potential

Thinking About Women

Lucy Ellman’s massive new novel is an encyclopaedic narrative whose stream of consciousness style recalls Rabelais and Sterne, Kerouac, Woolf, Vonnegut, and of course Joyce,…

World Politics

We’re All Hot Now

In April 1986, reactor No 4 at Chernobyl in north Ukraine exploded, spewing radioactive flames and gases high into the air. An estimated dispersal of…

The Spud’s Companion

Ireland has of course been long associated, for both good and ill, with the potato. Its most delicious accompaniment, butter, has a long history too,…

Irish Literature

Into Their Own

A substantial bilingual English-Irish anthology that breaks new ground with its critical survey of modern Irish poetry takes up where Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas…

World History

Red Star Over China

Mao Zedong’s vision in the late 1940s was to replicate Soviet communism, whatever the cost for his people. The espousal of values of freedom and…

Irish History

Florence O’Donoghue

Born in Killarney in 1928, the son of a former RIC man, Florence O’Donoghue had an eminent career in the law in England and spent…

World Art / Culture

An Incendiary Film

DW Griffith’s ‘Birth of A Nation’, released a hundred years ago and based on a novel by the Scotch-Irish propagandist Thomas Dixon, portrayed the liberation…