Enda O’Doherty writes: John Fleming has contributed pieces to the Dublin Review of Books over a good number of years: essays, book reviews, blog posts occasioned by the deaths of friends or admired figures in the music world. A few extracts may give the flavour of the Fleming prose style and the nature of his recurring preoccupations. On John Cooper Clarke: Clarke likes words and uses them as imaginative brickwork to impart both anecdote and nuance. The Midas touch of his stage performance is evident in his wielding of phrases to yield a type of brutal yet dandified insight: ‘It became a clich ..read more

Martin Tyrrell writes: Half a century has passed since Pink Floyd released their game-changing album The Dark Side of the Moon. I first caught up with it some five years after the event, by which time it was already deeply unfashionable. Pink Floyd were the definitive progressive rock band – arthouse film soundtracks, an abortive collaboration with Roland Pettit on a ballet based on Proust – and Dark Side of the Moon, with its Hipgnosis sleeve, the quintessential prog album. Now, though, progress was out of favour. I bought it anyway and enjoyed it like a guilty pleasure. The sound effects bec ..read more

Robin Wilkinson writes: Whenever I came over from London to visit my cousins in Co Meath, long before the M3 cut a swathe through the Boyne Valley, I’d catch the Dublin to Kells bus and have the driver let me off at the turning to Tara. That meant moving up to the front at Ross Cross, where a sign points left to Dunsany. We sometimes took that road when driving over to Trim, and my cousin Mary would slow down slightly to point out a field between two woods, once a cricket ground where Lord Dunsany’s XI played against Clontarf and Phoenix Park and wandering sides with grand names like I Zingari ..read more

Dr Struan Kennedy writes: This year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement which formally ended thirty years of the conflict known as the Troubles. Naturally there has been a series of events commemorating this significant milestone which have, just as understandably, celebrated the achievements of those involved in bringing about momentous change. However, while a distinct trend in the historiography favours a top-down approach, delivered by elite political actors, the project ‘Paving the Path to Peace: Civil Society and the Northern Irish Peace Proces ..read more

On May 22nd last, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University gave a talk at Maynooth University (and at Trinity College the next day) entitled ‘The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’. Khalidi, who is Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is a highly distinguished historian of the Middle East, with many books to his name, including The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, first published in 2020. Conor McCarthy, who organised the Maynooth talk, here introduces Khalidi’s main points, which warrant wide circulation: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is maybe the best history ..read more

James Williams writes: The novelist Evelyn Waugh was perhaps the best known of the fugitives seeking shelter in Ireland from the socialist storm brought about by the election of a Labour government in Britain in 1945. Fresh from the popular and financial success of his threnody for the Anglo-Catholic aristocracy, Brideshead Revisited, Waugh was violently out of sympathy with the Attlee administration: The French called the occupying German army ‘the grey lice’. That is precisely how I regard the occupying army of English socialist government. Like Yeats, Waugh came from a middle class family a ..read more

Lia Mills writes: Victoria Amelina had a way of walking straight into your heart and making herself at home there. She had no time to waste; she was easy to love. Living the dangerous life of a war crimes researcher, gathering testimony from survivors of Russian atrocities in Ukraine and using her considerable intellectual and writing gifts to write searing, accurate reports, she knew she had a target on her back. Every time she visited recently liberated areas of her country near the front line she went into danger. We all knew the danger she was in but there was some unquenchable flame in he ..read more

 Katrina Goldstone writes, In January 1987, Stella Jackson, who wrote under the pen name, Stella Fitzthomas Hagan, put a halt to her proposed memoir, declaring it unlikely she would ever manage to finish it. She had only reached the period of the late 1940s, in a life that would span from 1908 -1992. Despite her ardent literary ambitions, she published only one novel in her lifetime, The Green Cravat, about Lord Edward Fitzgerald and 1798, and wrote a handful of plays which were never performed. In her obituary in Saothar, the Labour History journal, the novel was alluded to as receiving ..read more

James Williams writes: In the years after World War Two, hundreds of thousands of Irish people migrated to Britain. In all, almost one in six of the population quit the country in the 1950s as Ireland shared with East Germany the unenviable distinction of being the only countries in Europe whose population declined over the decade. The huddled masses of poor and tired yearning to be free who packed the boats to England in these years came predominantly from the small farms of the countryside and the working class of Ireland’s towns and cities. The push for their exodus came from the poverty, s ..read more

Sean Byrne writes: In recent commemorations of the Civil War, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have all accepted that atrocities were committed by both sides during that conflict. Yet none of those parties have mentioned the ruthless suppression by the new state of the struggles by workers to better their wretched conditions during the War of Independence and Civil War. It is particularly surprising that Sinn Féin has not mentioned those struggles as the party used claim to seek the establishment of a ‘thirty-two-county socialist republic’. (The word ‘socialist’ was not, however, used in S ..read more