Irish Literature

Charging Ahead

Kevin Kiely’s poetic aim is to manufacture insight, create a visionary moment, by hurling the elements of language together, by creating a linguistic explosion. This…

World Literature

From the Battlefield

Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’ is first and foremost an American poem. It is about a nation born in courage and descending into slack…

A Bhealach Féin

The writer and thinker Desmond Fennell has spent nearly seven decades searching for ways in which we – the Irish that is, but not just…

World History

The Long Conversation

We should neither heroise nor demonise the Romans, writes leading classicist Mary Beard, but we should take them seriously and not close down our long…

Irish Literature

Staying Grounded

A beautifully written memoir tells the life story of an Irish woman who knew most of the major figures of the bohemian Dublin of the…

Though the Sky Fall

When the legal forms and procedures of the state prove impotent, sometimes there is no recourse but to denunciation, if justice is to be done.…