Nick Maxwell Daniel Mulhall delves into Joyce’s classic novel and finds it teeming with figures from Irish history History and literature are often intertwined. With the passage of time, all contemporary writing eventually becomes part of the historical record, although it must be read with care if it is to provide a helpful window on the … Read more
Irish missionary orders had a dual mission—the religious and the medico-educational—and in many of the regions where they were active the legacy of schools and hospitals bear very obvious marks of their Irish inception. Irish missionary activity was gathering momentum in the early years of the twentieth century, and there were strong connections between the … Read more
An eighteenth-century Whig dressed in ill-fitting nineteenth-century Tory clothing? Seán Patrick Donlan assesses the hotly contested legacy of Edmund Burke For two centuries the legacy of Edmund Burke has been hotly contested and arguably distorted by apologists and opponents alike. In his day, the London press caricatured him as a whiskey-toting Jesuit, managing to combine … Read more
‘Whether I shall come out of this like I came out of what is associated with thinking proper I don’t know . . . Ah this work here, the stench, the washing, the enemas, the bed pans, the blood is my world. Not London Society, politics & that gateway into which I so strangely wandered—into … Read more
The sack of Baltimore, the only recorded instance of a slaving raid by corsairs in Ireland, was part of a wider pattern across Europe, encompassing not only the entire Mediterranean region but also the Atlantic seaboard as far north as Iceland. Slave-raiding of Christians by Muslim corsairs became common from the late fifteenth century … Read more