Conor Cruise O’Brien

A Variety of Voices

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‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’ Vincent Mercier on his editor at The Bell Sean O’Faoláin. In this second and final instalment, Frank Armstrong reviews Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices edited by Mark O’Brien and … Read more

An A.B.C. of Irish Modernism: Apocalypse, Boredom, Crack

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In a powerful 1997 essay, Seamus Deane suggested that the twin forces that beset modern Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats and James Joyce were those of Apocalypse and Boredom.[1]  Both the culture in which the writers lived and the art-works they produced are marked by phasic interruptions into colonial despondency of revelatory dramas and … Read more