Books drawn on in this essay include: Bard of Erin, The Life of Thomas Moore, by Ronan Kelly, Penguin Ireland, 624 pp, £25.00, ISBN: 978-1844881437 Memoirs...

In 1921, the second Dáil innovatively nominated a minister for fine arts, Count Horace Plunkett, and two staff. In his nineteen weeks in office, Plunkett organised one public event, a sexcentenary celebration of Dante. Then his ministry was subsumed into a department of education. Plunkett’s appointment was the first of many false starts, as the state, like many others throughout the twentieth century, struggled with the idea of supporting the arts as a good in itself.

  In the September issue of the Dublin Review of Books, Emmet O’Connor describes my book United Nation – the case for integrating Ireland as...

Frank McGuinness is a writer of openness and adventure. Openness to form: while best known as a playwright, while highly regarded as a poet since the 1990s, he has made forays into other genres, writing short fiction in the early 1980s and publishing two novels in the last decade; openness to varying manner and textures, which can range from tightly focused social realism to fantasy. The list of his stage and film adaptations suggests a keen literary appetite, eager to try anything.

As might be expected, the immediate response to the Rising of those that were or would soon become the leading Irish writers was probably as complex as that of the Irish public more generally. If a generalisation might be risked, the letters and other early writings of 1916 suggest a sense of stunned incomprehension, this sooner or later modulating in some cases into a grudging respect for the executed leaders.

The arrival of Christianity in Ireland and the unhelpful notion of ‘paganism’

The triumph of liberal Britain, which survived the eclipse of the party

The troubadour who mangled ‘Moore’s Melodies’ and inspired Joyce

Modernism and the influence of ‘cinematicity’ on perception

The hyphenated music of Maurice Scully’s shadowy airs

The life of Belfast trade unionist and revolutionary socialist James Baird

A selection of from the pages of the prestigious ‘Dublin Review’

Fighting for decent salaries and conditions for low-paid civil servants

Manchán Magan’s guided tour through the landscapes of ancient Ireland

A fascinating and at times unflinching autobiography from Paul Brady

The second Irish cultural revival of the late 1950s and early ’60s

The unconsidered perils of the nationalist rush to Irish unity

The short but productive life of Joseph Roth, elegist of Habsburg Austria

The achievement of a great entertainer, ‘queen of crime’ Agatha Christie

Shriver’s irritation: a pose that doesn’t add up to a set of ideas

What ‘everyone knows’ about Catholic Ireland, and the more complex reality

A recent serendipitous find in the Oxfam shop in Belfast and costing all of £1.75, Professor Sharpley-Whiting’s account (she’s a US academic specialising in...

Poems of flight, new beginnings, sad partings and rich harvests

The greatest 20th century poet writing in English along with WB Yeats

The traditions and development of a very special Spanish wine