O’Brien’s new book demonstrates how an industrial project to harness electricity from the Shannon became an opportunity to market it as an epochal monument of modernism in the new Free State. Continue reading
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Particularies of Time and Space
It is not just landscape and history and personal objects and events that shape us, but also the more casual and systematic reading we do …. Continue reading
A Foot-soldier’s Misgivings about 1916
What is so refreshing about this narrative of the Easter Rising is its clear-eyed honesty about how ill-prepared the insurgents were to take on the British. Continue reading
In a Subjunctive Mood by David Harris
His light touch reflects his playful approach to a range of topics. Continue reading
A Legacy of Myths
Book Review by James McCaughey Colm Toibin House of Names, Picador. May 2017 RRP: $29.99 h/b 261 pp ISBN: 978 1760 551421 The ancient Greeks have left us a legacy of myths. Some of them are still current – the stories of Oedipus or Antigone, for instance. Others, though less known, the story of Pygmalion say, have … Continue reading
Gods, Graves And Scholars
Williams refers to the Túatha as the ‘god-people’ to convey their indeterminate status between humanity and divinity Continue reading
The Wing Orderly’s Tales.
It might all lead to dull or grim stories, but Gebler’s characters are all human, damaged certainly, but each with his own story.
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Australia’s first Political Assassination
In September 1916, a 27-year-old police officer George Duncan was shot dead in Tottenham, a small mining town in the copper belt of western New South Wales. The perpetrators were Roland Kennedy and Frank Franz, two members of the IWW. Continue reading
Floating Prisons
The Surprise, moored at the Cove of Cork, and the Essex, at Kingstown in Dublin Bay (now Dun Laoghaire), were derelict ships which operated as holding prisons for convicts from 1823 until 1837. Continue reading
First hand witness of the Famine
How did an anti-Mason Protestant Abolitionist, temperance advocate and vegetarian from Vermont (USA) become a first hand witness of the Great Famine and a practical advocate for famine relief? Continue reading
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