Recent Articles

Catriona Clutterbuck The author Colm Toibín salutes the fact that in his final collection, Human Chain, Seamus Heaney ‘wrote about growing older and weaker with a shivering honesty and grace’.1 Honesty inheres in this volume’s unflinching recognition of mortality in terms of injury, illness, depletion of powers and death; grace, in its remarkable formal achievement, […]

Patrick Crotty: The Letters of Seamus Heaney, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2023), 820 pages.

Thomas O’Grady :: On 29 August 2013, the day before Seamus Heaney died unexpectedly in Dublin, shocking into deep grieving not only the Irish world but also the global literary community and his vast legion of readers, I read a notice in the London Review of Books for a lecture he was scheduled to deliver at London’s Southbank Centre in November. The title of the lecture was advertised as ‘The Second Life of Art’. Perhaps he intended to engage with ideas advanced in an essay of that same title by Italian belletrist and fellow Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale, though I…

Shona Minson || Punishment is not a binary process, affecting only victim and offender, nor a transactional process between the state and the punished. Punishment impacts not just those directly involved, but also families, communities, and society more generally. Punishment sets in motion events with long- term consequences, and very little attention is paid at sentencing to the life- changing effects of even short sentences of imprisonment.

Kevin Rafter || Whether it was of him powering down the corridors in Leinster House or hasitly arriving into a radio studio, the image of John Bruton that sticks in my mind is of a man on the move. He did not have the easy gait of an athlete, but he walked with powerful intent. And then there was the laugh, raucous but warm. It almost wrapped itself around those in his company

Peadar Kirby || ‘A better kind of politics’, which Pope Francis called for in the quote with which the first part of this article concluded, requires focusing on the social grounding of all political power, namely civil society and the many ways in which an individualistic atomisation has eroded the collectivities, and indeed the inherent democratic culture, on which political society depends if it is to flourish.

Kevin Hargaden || In exploring the place of the prison in the Bible

John O’Hagan || One might argue that the ‘output’ of the arts sector is very difficult to measure, and this is probably true, but so also is the output of the police service or the educational system or the health service. The arts sector is no different.