The romantic view of terrorists as misfits and lost souls, presented by Dostoevsky and Conrad in their work, is very much at odds with the practical and structured guerilla warfare that was seen during Ireland’s War of Independence
First published in the journal of the University of Limerick History Society, History Studies, vol.6 (2005), pp.2-17. The small fourteenth-century Florentine panel in the Hunt Museum, Limerick, shows an image of the Crucifixion. Beside the cross the Virgin falls in a swoon, supported by one of the holy women and St John the Evangelist. At […]
I attended the talk one evening last June, upstairs in a second-hand bookshop a short walk from my home. The journalist had reported in the past from Iran and Iraq and was now just back from Libya, the outcome of the war there still uncertain. During the discussion which followed a human rights lawyer who […]
In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is […]
As is so often the way with beginnings, I was looking for someone and something else completely when I stumbled on the class Samia Mehrez is teaching. Professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, she came up with the idea of Translating the Revolution and organised its schedule within weeks of Mubarak’s […]
Introduction Six hundred years of oppression and slavery have passed in meloncholy succession over our father's heads and our own, during which period we have been visited by every evil which tyranny could devise and cruelty execute; we have been scattered, like chaff, over the land, and our name has been forgotten among the nations. […]
&ldquoI foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”1 [Joseph Conrad] The later half of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic surge in colonial activity, as competing capitalist powers revisited mercantilism and sought to gain access to new […]
Michael Collins and the Irish war of Indpendence In the first of a series of articles, Colm McInerney details events surrounding the Irish War of indpendence. For an brief introduction to the period click here Introduction &ldquoOur only way to carry on the fight was by organised and bold guerilla warfare. But this in itself […]
&ldquoThey took all the trees Put ’em in a tree museum And they charged the people A dollar and a half just to see ’em Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got Till it’s gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot” [Joni Mitchell. &ldquoBig Yellow Taxi”] […]
Any English—speaker to whom Vaclav Havel has mattered owes a debt they’re probably unaware of to Paul Wilson. His work as the Czech writer’s translator began thirty years ago but I discover, over a cup of coffee off Russell Square, that he first came to London from his native Canada ten years before that, to […]
