Essays
Singing Ireland’s Song
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...
A Place for the Arts
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.
Misrepresentations
In the September issue of the Dublin Review of Books, Emmet O’Connor describes my book United Nation – the case for integrating Ireland as...
A Restless Imagination
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.
Inventing the Republic? II
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.
Idols and Good Old Gods
The arrival of Christianity in Ireland and the unhelpful notion of ‘paganism’
Changing the Question
The triumph of liberal Britain, which survived the eclipse of the party
Joyce’s Eye
Modernism and the influence of ‘cinematicity’ on perception
Observing Proportion
The hyphenated music of Maurice Scully’s shadowy airs
A Cosmopolitan Voice
A selection of from the pages of the prestigious ‘Dublin Review’
Part of the Union
Fighting for decent salaries and conditions for low-paid civil servants
Back to the Womb
Manchán Magan’s guided tour through the landscapes of ancient Ireland
Out of the Doldrums
The second Irish cultural revival of the late 1950s and early ’60s
On the Precipice
The short but productive life of Joseph Roth, elegist of Habsburg Austria
Murder Most Foul
The achievement of a great entertainer, ‘queen of crime’ Agatha Christie
‘The Catholic Church’
What ‘everyone knows’ about Catholic Ireland, and the more complex reality
Celebrating Bricktop
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...
Death in the Valley
Poems of flight, new beginnings, sad partings and rich harvests
Rumpled Giant
The greatest 20th century poet writing in English along with WB Yeats
The Grapes of Mirth
The traditions and development of a very special Spanish wine
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