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Autumn 2026
Welcome to the latest issue which includes Michael Ignatieff on captive minds; Emer Nolan on a new biography of James Joyce; Conor McCarthy on Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning; a new poem by Vona Groarke, the current Ireland Professor of Poetry; Kevin Stevens’ interview with the novelist Ben Markovits; Ewan Fernie on Shakespeare as thinker; Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh on ancient Gaelic warriors; Robert Gildea on the fate of Jews in Vichy France; Maurice Earls on Daniel O’Connell; Steven Smith on Isaiah Berlin; Daniel Gordon on the tyranny of choice; and Martin Tyrrell revisits Catcher in the Rye; Cover photo by Ellen Fitzpatrick.
The next issue of the drb is due out on December 1 featuring, John Banville on Robert Louis Stevenson; Catherine Cox on the Magdalene laundries; Ronan McDonald on Brian Dillon’s ambivalence; Sinead O’Sullivan on Marianna Mazzucato’s The Common Good Economy; Brian Ó Curnáin on a new history of the Celts; Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty; and Derek Hand on the latest edition of Joyce’s Dubliners.
Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has…
Kieran Fionn Murphy writes: Depictions of type 2 diabetes remain virtually absent from English-language novels, even though 589 million people worldwide have the disease. A mere mention of…
David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag,…
Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of…
‘It’s a dangerous way of looking at the world, which is partly what “The Rest of Our Lives” starts out with – Tom thinking you can measure a marriage and a life in terms of grades.’
O’Connell believed in the separation of church and state. In 1837 he denounced traditionalist Don Carlos, fearing he would restore ‘that disastrous connection between church and state which for two centuries has plunged Spain into the deepest moral degradation’.
A new poem by the current Ireland Professor of Poetry.
Bernard Williams showed that analytic philosophy could be insightful and engaging as well as precise and rigorous.
A new, engaging study of Shakespeare’s tragedies opens up deeper, more general questions as well as a way of thinking better and farther about the complex matter of living.
It is not easy to challenge the Resistance myth in France, which has shifted from being military and patriotic to humanitarian and ecumenical. But this book does.
A monumental treatment of the rise of English literature as a university discipline in Britain from the 1860s to the 1960s.
Playing with envy is like playing with fire. It just isn’t worth it and should come with a mental health warning.
An authoritative, accessible study of the evolution and persistent appeal of the Fianna, the warrior-band that included Fionn mac Cumhaill and his son, Oisín.