Issue 73, December 2015
In This Issue
Spiritual Security
To the extent that Russia’s project of joining the Western developed world has failed, and it has failed, its search for a distinctive world stance appears urgent; the paradigm of a united state and church, defined against a decadent, liberal and atheist West, is much favoured.
Silent Witnesses
Bodies preserved in bogland, dating from the Iron Age or even before, are found right across northwestern Europe. It is difficult to know a great deal of their lives or beliefs or interpret their deaths, but what we do know is that their killers tried to obliterate them; and failed.
The Long Conversation
We should neither heroise nor demonise the Romans, writes leading classicist Mary Beard, but we should take them seriously and not close down our long conversation with their legacy. But has that legacy been everywhere and always the same one?
Boza Calling
Orhan Pamuk is a writer whose life and work are held aloft as emblematic of his country’s wishes and woes. In his new novel, Pamuk suggests that tradition in the public sphere need not be dangerous
Terror Without Mercy
Huge numbers of people died in the Nazi concentration camps but they were not where the majority of Jews perished. Rather they were an instrument of the regime’s desire for total repression and control which changed and adapted to suit the particular needs of the time.
A Cooling Cinder
A fictional portrait of Dublin in the years leading up to the Great War and 1916 is brimming with ideas and has a great deal of historical interest, even if its author’s ill-digested anger at his enemies and overschematic approach to characterisation may reduce the artistry.
Wee Book, Big Muscles
Don Paterson should be recognised as a poet who offers us strenuousness and sweetness in a way that nobody has since John Donne; he kills his enemies and loves his friends, making us vibrantly aware of poetry’s capabilities as an affectionate medium.
Daddy’s Pal
A memoir can be an expansive story in which, regrettably, nothing is left out and which one would really prefer not to have to listen to. Or it can be a careful literary construction where much raw material has clearly been set aside and what remains is shaped by patient artifice.
Getting the Left on Track
A new book that argues that the way forward for social democracy is more state, more tax, more spending fails to convince. If these were recipes likely to be favoured by the electorate there would be social democratic governments thriving all over the Western world.
The Risen People
The 1916 Rising can summon up more unanimity of feeling in the nation than many other events that occurred a few years before or after. Nevertheless, whatever our sympathy for the participants, we should be wary of considering it a well-planned military affair.
Down the Rabbit Hole
A Russian-Irish writer in the tradition of Bulgakov
From War To War
The celebrated German historian Heinrich August Winkler argues that it was not only the First World War but also the global economic depression after 1929 that were the twin events leading to so much catastrophe and destruction in European history in the twentieth century.
Earth’s Old Bones
John Keats championed the truth of imagination, while the naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt was the first to see nature as a unified organism. Moya Cannon invites both to tea. It’s an edgy business. She serves them in separate rooms and spends more time with Keats.
A Necessary Correction
Arthur Griffith: the most misunderstood major figure in modern Irish history
Post-Punk Polymath
It is no surprise that such an outstanding lyricist as Elvis Costello should be able to deliver such an engaging autobiography. And for a man who used to punch out an album with a free EP, plus a brace of singles with extra B-sides each year, it is no shock it should be so long.