Reality Bites

Toy Story

Attack, attack, attack

Covering the Eighth

A Diplomatic Odyssey

The ‘soft power’ of promoting the literary heritage of Ireland abroad

From Trendy to Ted

Reflections on the TV career of comic actor Dermot Morgan

What Spies Do

Sean Bourke and the springing from jail of Russian agent George Blake

Station of the Cross

Irish television: a dangerous medium is launched in a Catholic country

Poor White Trash

How liberals in the US treated Bill Clinton’s accuser Paula Jones

The War on Words

Spoken Chinese is a tonal language quite unlike English – with four possible tones to each sound and a fifth atonal sound that can turn…

Legal Fictions

In the story ‘Ichthyanthrope’ a defendant in a murder trial urges his counsel to present an explanation for his wife’s death that defies conventional reason,…

Rude Mechanicals?

The 19th century construction of Irish identity involved opposition to ‘English materialism’, with an accompanying tendency to belittle or exclude the industrial North East. But…

The SS’s Bargaining Chips

As World War Two drew to an end, a number of prominent prisoners of the Germans were moved to South Tyrol in the Italian Alps.…

Halting the Waves

In the last three years, more than two million immigrants – primarily young men – have entered EU states. The policies being followed by European…

Van The Youth

The postwar decades in Northern Ireland were ones of modest prosperity, and the bitter conflict that had marked the birth of the state seemed on…

Family Troubles

A novel set in Ireland and in various of the theatres of the Second World war is based on the historical story of an Irish…

A Canine Resurrection

The ancient Irish Wolfhound was chosen as an emblem for the Abbey Theatre and a mascot for the Irish Volunteers. But in fact the dog…

Gypsy Dancer

Johann Trollman was a gifted athlete who floated like a butterfly through German boxing bouts in the 1930s. But he was a member of the…

Rebellion of the Intellect

In the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published one hundred years ago this year, the hero’s father, Simon Dedalus, describes the Irish…

Communities At War

It might be expected that World War II’s impact in Northern Ireland would be determined by sectarian criteria, with unionists relishing the opportunity to prove…

A War Without End

Steam locomotive C5631 is proudly displayed in the museum at the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan, where prime ministers come to honour war criminals. There is…

Imagining the Irish

Good-humoured, charming, hospitable and gregarious, yet drawn to tragedy. Are the Irish subject to some kind of collective manic depression ‑ lurching wildly from exuberant…

Casting a Spell

The older I get, John Burnside remarks, the happier my childhood gets. In a third volume of memoirs he goes further towards an understanding of…

The Goggle Box

Television has been accused of dumbing down the population almost since it was invented. For TS Eliot even the word itself was ugly and foreign.…

Crimes and Punishment

Germans have confronted the crimes of the Nazi regime with honesty and thoroughness. Important sections of Japanese society, however, prefer to forget or forgive the…

The Writing Cure

Ross Skelton’s memoir of his Antrim childhood and his unhappy relationship with his father casts light on some of the hidden complexities of Ulster society…

Missing

Throughout their captivity, the Irish seamen consistently refused to sign an agreement to become freie Arbeiter – voluntary workers ‑ for the German Reich. In…