Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
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Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
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Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
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Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
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A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
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... Novel in Late Capitalist Globalisation – which track the translation of cultural capital from London to Dublin and New York, and the emergence of a globalised fiction in which America is a base.‘Flann O’Brien was right,’ Deane says at the start of ‘Emergency Aesthetics’. ‘Joyce was invented by Americans. He was part of their foreign policy, of ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... from all over southern England crammed together shoulder to shoulder without face masks in Central London, in defiance of the rules against large gatherings, would seem a display of selfishness provocative enough to justify its being broken up by the police. But what is democracy without political protest? And it was a genuine political protest. It was an ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... edition includes later news taking us to the Anita Hall case and the reactions to Thelma and Louise. Yet Marilyn French’s The War against Women is the more telling book. It is brief, where Faludi is excursive; it does not wear the accoutrements of research as well (it has no index), and it is written in a much more peremptory, less immediately engaging ...

‘Everything is possible’

James Meek: In Greenland, 17 April 2025

... whose grandmother was from Arsuk, and her collaborator, another young academic called Marie-Louise Jensen, examine the archived account books of the cryolite company to tot up how much money, in modern terms, the mine and factory made, and how this figure compares to the amount the Danish government has spent on Greenland over the years. Various figures ...

Husbands and Wives

Terry Castle: Claude & Marcel, Gertrude & Alice, 13 December 2007

Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore 
edited by Louise Downie.
Tate Gallery, 240 pp., £25, June 2006, 1 59711 025 6
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Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice 
by Janet Malcolm.
Yale, 229 pp., £16.99, October 2007, 978 0 300 12551 1
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... skills: they sent their negatives to professional processing laboratories on Jersey or else in London or Paris. The local jobbing men managed to produce some thrilling results (one wonders what they thought of the weirder snaps). Disappointingly, however, most of the ‘art’ pictures survive only in the form of negatives and contact sheets: many more ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... Flaubert enjoyed an easy access to these states of mind outside his writing life, but he scolded Louise Colet (in a letter that Roth quotes in My Life as a Man) for a poem in which personal emotion distorted her judgment: ‘You have turned art into an outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an outflow. It smells bad; it smells of hate!’ Roth’s ...