Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (eds), Peter Lang, 298 pp, €49.40, ISBN: 978-1800790834 The publication of this volume could hardly have come at a worse time for its reception by a world outraged by the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinian civilians,…
In May 1909, Leonard Dunning, the head constable of Liverpool, wrote to the Home Office in London to warn that some very serious disturbances were looming in the city. Dunning had previously spent thirteen years in the Royal Irish Constabulary and, as he reminded Whitehall, ‘had a good deal of experience of troubles between Orangemen…
In much of the ancient world a city’s emblem was its walls. ‘O Ur-shanabi,’ proclaims the hero in the last lines of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, ‘climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!’ Realising he cannot escape death, Gilgamesh takes comfort knowing the city walls of Uruk will be his legacy. The Old…
In a moving obituary in New Left Review, the great sociologist Stuart Hall noted Raphael Samuel’s talent for ‘quarrying’ lives and historical themes. Inadvertently or not, in employing this verb – it recurs three times in the relatively short text – Hall evokes one of his friend, comrade and colleague’s short studies, ‘Headington Quarry: Recording…
On January 7th, 1922, at the end of thirteen days of extraordinary debate about whether to endorse the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Dáil Éireann voted sixty-four to fifty-seven to do so. Éamon de Valera, president of the Irish Republic, who had led the arguments against it, said: I would like my last word here to be…
I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect Free Trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. These are the opening words of a lecture delivered by the economist John Maynard Keynes in Dublin in April 1933….
Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson, John Murray, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1529369991 In mid-eighteenth-century England, a group of literary women emerged who presented the society of their time with the possibility of the existence of something new – ‘a socially acceptable intelligent woman’. Susannah Gibson’s engaging new work, Bluestockings, The First Women’s…
Ireland’s Long Economic Boom: The Celtic Tiger Economy, 1986-2007, by Eoin O’Malley, Palgrave Macmillan, 264 pp, €53.49 and Open Access, ISBN: 978-3031530692 This book by economist Eoin O’Malley is an excellent, analytical study of the reasons why Ireland, one of the poorest economies in Europe, was transformed within a relatively short period into one…
Micheál Martin has accused the anti-NATO lobby of consistently claiming that Ireland faces the threat of membership of a military alliance, conscription into a European army, and even the presence of ‘NATO tanks in O’Connell Street’. In the Dáil, Bríd Smith asked Martin did he want to send the sons and daughters of ‘mostly working…
Why did the Kilkenny-born writer Francis Hackett emigrate so soon after finishing his secondary education at Clongowes in 1900? Why did he not go on to UCD? Why, despite working briefly for the leading Irish-American figure, lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn, did he not settle into the Irish-American cultural milieu like his…