Celebrating Uncertainty

What emerges clearly is a sense of Friel’s international importance. A chapter comparing him to Osborne and Storey liberates his plays from some of the confines that Irish scholarship restricts him to, showing clearly the universal significance of his work.

Just Make Do

With the slow death of God and religion, and the unsatisfactory nature of philosophy or what postmodernists call grand narratives, the beauty and pleasure of everyday life may be the only thing people can hold onto.

Labour Waits

Irish socialism was divided and weak in the early decades of the twentieth century, while the axis of trade union solidarity ran through Dublin and Merseyside, not Dublin, Belfast and Cork.

Strong Hand, Beloved Leader

A hoard of letters written by Germans to Hitler show a people keen to abdicate their responsibility and infantilise themselves, but they do not indicate any great enthusiasm for either Nazi ideology or territorial aggression.

The Beat on the Streets

From Phil Chevron of the Radiators to Stompin’ George Verschoyle spinning rockabilly hits at the Magnet Bar, it is the evocations of the Dublin music scene that stand out in a new miscellany of pieces on the city’s social and cultural history.

Clash of the Titans

The pragmatism associated with JM Keynes derives from a sustained optimism in the capacity of intelligence to inform and influence correct responses to a crisis. Hayek’s market morality reflects an altogether more pessimistic view of human behaviour.