In relation to Daniel Mulhall’s article “Parallel Parnell” in the May/June 2010 issue, which speculates on the course Parnell’s career might have taken if he had married in 1880 and never become involved with Katherine O’Shea: Parnell seems to be the figure of modern Irish history who most strongly attracts counterfactual speculation. This is because he … Read more
These essays initially appeared as ‘urgent public interventions at critical moments’ between 2001 and 2008. Collected together at the conclusion of India’s blockbuster 2009 general election, they present ‘a detailed underview’ of the consequences and corollaries of democracy (p. xi) and of partition’s long shadow. Gandhi once described independence as a ‘wooden loaf’ (p. 18)—notional … Read more
From a clear blue sky takes the form of a three-part drama: before the bomb, after the bomb and learning to live with the bomb. But it opens with the climax. In the early hours of Monday 27 August 1979, members of the IRA stowed between four and five pounds of explosives under the floorboards … Read more
The best travel books always have a back story: the line that goes back through time, tethering the writer to the reason why they wanted to write this particular book, make this particular journey. When Dervla Murphy was a child in Lismore, Co. Waterford, she received gifts of a second-hand bicycle and an atlas for … Read more