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
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a giant among philosophers, though she only published the first of her nineteen books at the age of fifty-nine, a feat which is unfathomable today in more than one respect. That anyone could start so late and produce so much, and so vibrantly (she produced in addition over two-hundred-and-eighty articles) is close to miraculous … Read more
It is a river vast, both wide and deep that corrals out joy and sadness; lulls to sleep the fretful child, and transforms the darkest landscape of a man depressed into a golden glowing cape. It is not just the spice of life, but our very life blood, perhaps the central issue in human and … Read more
It is difficult to speak of abstract forces without personalising them, or investing them, magically, with consciousness and will. When we (by this I mean you; I never do this) refer to the markets as ‘growing jittery’, or ‘recovering’, we (you) indulge in the same thinking that saw maidens being sacrificed to appease volcano gods. … Read more
The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including two, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ and ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, from the golden age of Gaelic literature in the early middle ages. I – The Second Battle of Moytura Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Second Battle of Moytura’) c. 875 … Read more
I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is the most important work of English-language literature that has been published so far this century. O’Siadhail’s towering achievement melds reflections on the arts, economics, politics, philosophy and, fascinatingly, science into lyrical verse that transfixes the reader. He urges we enter … Read more
We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was linked to the first use of fire, that most seminal of technologies, whose devouring mysteries transfix us with a spirit that endows our own. I see one among a band awakening from a dream, and entering a trance. She incants … Read more
Last month’s opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem served to re-ignite Palestinian rage against what many there regard as a latter-day ‘Crusader’ state, a term with particular resonance in that region. No other city juxtaposes such piety and passion as Jerusalem. It is sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and … Read more
June 1985: I was at work in my garden shed, when I heard someone talking. I looked out and saw a man with a sub-machine gun. He was guarding the back of the old synagogue, that had become the Irish Jewish museum. President Chaim Hertzog, who was raised in Dublin, was opening it that fine … Read more
It is as if anyone writing about Venezuela must pass through the red channel, for all have something to declare. The competing narratives of Left and Right offer ideologically-tainted accounts, often saying more about any commentator’s domestic politics than Venezuela’s predicament. But even diehard supporters of the country’s charismatic former President Hugo Chávez cannot deny … Read more