Biography

A Failure to Return

World Literature

The Impossibility of Memory

When Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, the great oral epic of Western culture, was written down, something changed forever. There is a sense in which ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí…

Her Dance with History

One might have expected of Eavan Boland’s posthumously published last collection a certain composure, poems that would speak at last of a history in which…

Irish Literature

The Ring of Truth

There are things you ‘know for a fact’ but perhaps cannot prove. Sometimes the frustration of such situations can drive a journalist to turn to…

Irish History

No Plaster Saint

James Connolly’s participation in the 1916 Rising was part of a calculated gamble. Glorifying him as an exponent of physical force politics, however, is a…