Here we go again. For the third consecutive presidential election, US voters are likely to face a choice between a moderate career politician and an angry demagogue for whom lying and gaslighting are not just nasty political tactics but governing principles and reflexive personal traits. The result, the polls tell us, could go either way. How, reasonable people ask, could anyone with a shred of civic responsibility vote once for Donald Trump, never mind a third time? What is his hold on half the voting population? And what kind of political culture allows a would-be dictator and the cowed part ..read more

How fast is the influence of the far right in Ireland growing? This question has been on the agenda of public discussion since the assertion of the Garda Commissioner in May 2023 that the far right has failed to grow in Ireland, bucking trends in other European countries. ‘Across Europe,’ he said, ‘we have seen a growth in the far right that hasn’t actually been replicated in Ireland,’ adding that the numbers in the Republic remained small. The Commissioner’s measure of growth was the number of anti-immigrant protests taking place – which went down in the first half of the year. Absent from hi ..read more

Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s Nutting Squad, and the British Spooks who ran the War, by Richard O’Rawe, Merrion Press, 254 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374470 The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money, by Jennifer O’Leary, Merrion Press, 256 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-1785374616 In his novel The Human Factor (1978), the wartime MI6 officer turned novelist Graham Greene takes us on an exploration of the motives of those involved in secret intelligence. The plot revolves primarily around a mole hunt for a spy leaking classif ..read more

On February 13th 1936, the French socialist leader Léon Blum left the Palais Bourbon in Paris, the site of the lower house of parliament, to travel the relatively short distance to his home on the île Saint-Louis. He was driven by Georges Monnet, a friend and colleague, and they were accompanied by Monnet’s wife, Germaine. As the Citroën B12 turned from rue de l’Université into the boulevard Saint-Germain it found its progress obstructed by a large crowd which had come to attend the funeral of the historian Jacques Bainville, a leading figure of Action française, the largest and most influenti ..read more

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin, Allen Lane, 240 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241553480 Peter Turchin is the founder of the discipline of ‘cliodynamics’ (Clio being the ancient Greek muse of history), a big-data-enabled approach to the study of history over the very long term. He is frank in his claim that cliodynamics is a science; to aspire to being a science, of course, a discipline must discover at least approximate laws, which have robust if not absolute predictive value. Since 2011, Turchin has led a research team engaged in a remarkabl ..read more

  Is Ireland Neutral? The Many Myths of Irish Neutrality, by Conor Gallagher, Gill Books, 336 pp, €18.99, ISBN: 978-0717195992 Conor Gallagher asks a simple question: is Ireland neutral? However, as he amply demonstrates in this lucid, readable and very timely book, this simple question does not have a simple answer. A scan of newspaper headlines would suggest that everyone agrees that Ireland is indeed neutral. But opinions about neutrality’s meaning clash. For decades some have argued that our neutrality is being progressively eroded, and that its potential as a basis for a more active ..read more

The Return of the State by Graeme Garrard, Yale University Press, 227 pp, £16.99, ISBN: 978-0300256758 We are almost entirely dependent on the state for our security and wellbeing. And yet it often seems to be an uncherished institution. If the Irish state is in any way representative, it has had a bad press in recent decades. A consent refrain is that ‘the state has let us down’. Aggrieved citizens blame it for shortcomings in healthcare, housing, minority rights, planning and other areas. The complaints in Ireland though are usually that the state is not doing enough rather than it is doing ..read more

The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War, by Peter Stansky, Stanford University Press, 136 pp, £10.99, ISBN: 9781-503635494 In this short book, pioneering Orwell biographer Peter Stansky shows how Orwell’s development as a writer was influenced by the four major wars in which he participated ‑ the two world wars, the Spanish Civil War and the Cold War. These, Stansky argues, shaped Orwell as a writer, more so even than his experiences in Paris or Wigan. Although he was an actual combatant in only one of them ‑ the Spanish Civil War ‑ all four engaged him intellectually. This is true even o ..read more

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Volume XIII, 1965-1969, edited by Michael Kennedy, Eunan O’Halpin, Kate O’Malley, Bernadette Whelan, Kevin O’Sullivan, Jennifer Redmond and John Gibney, Royal Irish Academy, 882 pp, €50, ISBN: 978-1911479574 Horror films involve a suspenseful build-up to a decisive eruption of crisis. You know that something dramatically awful is going to happen, but despite an accumulation of warning signs you don’t know exactly what or when. You see people making the wrong decisions, and you sense a quickening momentum towards catastrophe. Despite being well aware of the co ..read more

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th of last year was at once shocking and epoch-making. Shocking in that here we had a permanent member of the Security Council infringing the basic provisions of the UN Charter and also the core provisions of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which set out the agreed parameters, including, importantly, that borders in Europe could only be changed by peaceful means and with agreement. Helsinki would eventually end the Cold War. It was not, of course, the first time a permanent member of the Security Council had engaged in armed invasion of another UN ..read more