Nick Maxwell BY AODHÁN CREALEY MARCH 13/1854 Harriet Smithson (53), actress and the first Madame Berlioz, died in Montmartre, Paris. In 1827, after regular appearances in Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre and London’s Drury Lane, Smithson, from Ennis, Co. Clare, took Paris by storm on her début in the role of a passionate Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Notables … Read more
Celtic Studies used to play an important part in Germany’s academic landscape. Today the discipline is considered rather exotic. Similarly, little attention is paid to Irish literature. In defiance of this, academics based in Germany share how and why they are keeping Irish heritage alive. By Laura Patz It must be tiring sometimes. Most … Read more
One of the perils of editorial writing, especially in a bi-monthly magazine such as this, is the risk of giving hostages to fortune. By the time you read this, the context in which it is received might have been altered by a breaking news story. Thus in my last I opined that ‘… the Irish … Read more
Author Katharine Simms in conversation with Hiram Morgan (UCC) Gaelic Ulster was once a vigorous, confident society, whose members fought and feasted, sang and prayed. It maintained schools of poets, physicians, historians and lawyers, whose studies were conducted largely in their own Gaelic language, rather than in the dead Latin of medieval schools elsewhere in … Read more
No other woman who never set foot on the island—with the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth I—has had a greater effect on the history of Ireland. But who was Katharine O’Shea (née Wood)? And what if she and Charles Stewart Parnell never met? Listen to History Ireland editor, Tommy Graham, discuss this contrafactual with Mary Kenny, Patrick Maume, Daniel Mulhall, and Margaret … Read more