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Summer 2026
Welcome to the latest issue which includes Edna Longley on Seamus Heaney’s Collected Poems; Kevin Power on the Dunblane massacre; Luke Gibbons on the world of John McGahern; a new poem by James Harpur; Yvonne Galligan on Charlie Haughey and Garret Fitzgerald; Paul Seabright on wealth and empires; Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh on the genesis of Irish modernity; Carla King on politics and dirty hands; Julian Padraic Young on the alleged virtue of hope; Enda O’Doherty on the far-right in France; Patricia Thane on the rise of miserablism in Britain; Charlie Lynch on illicit love in modern Ireland; Ruth Harris revisits her award-winning study of Alfred Dreyfus in our Rereadings series; Eamon Maher on Proustian thoughts from Ireland; David O’Connor on Rob Doyle’s latest novel; and Brian S Campbell on reinventing the Italian Renaissance.
The next issue of the drb is due out on September 1 and will feature a new poem by Vona Groarke, Ireland Professor of Poetry; Conor McCarthy on Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning; Wolfgang Streeck on the matter of Europe’s future; Simon Blackburn on the Oxbridge philosopher and public intellectual Bernard Williams; Martin Tyrrell on Catcher in the Rye; and Emer Nolan on a new biography of James Joyce
John Simmons writes: Is Homer the most influential writer of all time? We don’t know much about whoever he, she or they might have been, and we don’t know with…
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment…
Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection throws some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on…
Mike Gogan writes on Bloomsday: ‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’ This is one of quite a few yeses in the last paragraphs of ‘The…
This colossal volume of Heaney’s poems ‘almost disguises the fact that he is a poet by entombing his lyric in a mass of annotation, exegesis and “uncollected” poems’.
He never married, had no children, lived alone. He had few friends, and kept none for long. He ran a small DIY shop and was a keen photographer. He was also interested in guns.
The deliberate blurring of inside and outside is central to McGahern’s vision, the writer at once being absorbed in his surroundings and yet stepping back to articulate what goes without saying on the daily round.
A new poem by James Harpur
Ruth Harris reflects on her prize-winning study of the notorious Dreyfus case, ‘The Man on Devil’s Island’, and discovers new, fascinating parallels with our times.
A new study of the intense rivalry between Charlie Haughey and Garret FitzGerald suggests it may have ended up being a force for good for the country as a whole.
Must politics be kept separate from morals or can they be reconciled?
Arthur Balfour’s remark on the Irish Free State, ‘What was the Ireland the Free State took over? It was the Ireland we made’; a verdict that contained more than a grain of truth. But it was not the whole story.
A new study explores the lives of queer men in Dublin between the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the dawn of gay liberation in the early 1970s.