Chay Bowes A hundred years on from the blood-stained birth of a partitioned island of Ireland, another European country faces the prospect of settlement or war. If any people should understand the Ukrainian Question it is surely the Irish, who also confront a larger and far more powerful neighbour, a shared history and religion, and a population … Read more
Three Miles South of Carlow Town Walk with me. Don’t speak. Come to the place where the walls and stones Yield their shameful secrets. Listen. Listen. Stand and hear the black earth shifting, As she did then, to deny him his succour, And as she did when he slipped into her inky embrace. Three miles … Read more
The Russian bear looms in the English-speaking imagination as savage and barbaric, but with a native cunning in need of taming. Throughout the nineteenth century British imperialists looked on their seemingly ursine counterparts with a mixture of dread and superiority. William Makepeace Thackery’s poem ‘The Legend Of St. Sophia Of Kioff’ (1855) contains a typical … Read more