Enda O’Doherty writes: Zadie Smith, in a NYRB review back in 2008 of a biographical essay on Franz Kafka by Louis Begley, made the to my mind somewhat unlikely connection between the (apparently) tortured Prague fabulist and the merely grumpy Hull librarian Philip Larkin. But while the comparison may not work across all departments, it does seem that both writers were miserabilists and both misogynists, at least in theory. For Cyril Connolly, there was ‘no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. The person producing, or not producing, the good art in this case would of ..read more

Sean Byrne writes: As one of the Commissioners on Mother and Baby Homes, Professor Mary Daly, is a very distinguished historian, it is surprising that the consigning of so many single mothers to Mother and Baby Homes is not linked to Ireland’s economic underdevelopment from Independence to the 1960s. The report points out that Mother and Baby Homes were not unique to Ireland and that there were few such homes prior to Independence, yet by the 1940s, Ireland had the highest number of women in such homes in the world. Before the Famine, Ireland had one of the highest rates of marriage and one of ..read more

Hiram Morgan writes: Manuscripts are the principal key to studying the history of England’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the Irish State Papers held in the UK National Archives at Kew in London as well as several other collections in public and private archives. One of the issues with these papers is that there are a lot of important documents such as policy proposals, known as reform treatises, and intelligence reports where there is a question of authorship. Some documents have only initials; many more have no known author and ..read more

Ciarán O’Rourke writes: ‘Yours is the art that conveys / what the world is made of.’ So Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin writes in ‘Instructions to an Architect’, imploring her interlocutor to ‘build me a shelter’, in anticipation of a future that seems already ‘fractured from the inside’. The poet too can redeem and repair a broken world, as Ní Chuilleanáin herself has demonstrated over the course of her five-decade career. Although arguably never attaining the cultural visibility of Seamus Heaney or Eavan Boland, in recent years Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has received some of the acknowledgement it deserv ..read more

Kevin Power writes: It was John Barth’s achievement to become a significant figure without ever becoming a major, or even really a popular novelist. It was as if he decided, early in his career, that somebody had to be American Literature’s representative postmodernist, and that that somebody might as well be him. He filled the role superbly, even if it left him, finally, with a coterie reputation and with the uncertain immortality bestowed by a place on the syllabus. Which is to say that even if Barth isn’t always much fun to read, you can’t really tell the story of post-1945 American fiction ..read more

David Barnes writes: Succession’s Frank Vernon likes ‘to recite Prufrock internally while we check we’re GAAP-compliant’ (Season Two, Episode Six). He goes on to suggest others ‘use whatever method you prefer to numb the pain’. GAAP are Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – principles that Waystar Royco, the corporate behemoth whose story is chronicled in HBO’s Succession, bend to the point of breaking. It is not the first time Frank, Waystar’s vice-chairman, has referred to TS Eliot’s first published poem (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry magazine in June 1915). I ..read more

Eoin O’Brien writes: Dublin’s Graftonia: A Very Literary Neighbourhood is the latest in a series of books by Brendan Lynch on the literary history of Dublin. It follows, in a logically progressive sequence, Parsons Bookshop: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin (2006) and Prodigals & Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin’s Baggotonia (2011). In these books, Lynch explores the literary enclave Baggotonia, which was first given a presence by John Ryan in Remembering How We Stood in 1975, and a year later, by Tony Cronin, in Dead As Doornails. The many talented personalities who occupied Bag ..read more

Maurice Earls writes: The Irish Jew, a comedy by John MacDonagh, had numerous successful runs in Dublin in the early 1920s. It was extremely popular, with performances usually twice a night. Billed as ‘Ireland’s Greatest Comedy’ and described as ‘easily the most successful play presented on the Irish stage during the present generation’, it was performed in venues such as the Queen’s, the Gaiety, the Tivoli and the Olympia. These were popular theatres in the older Dublin theatrical tradition, where the tone was a good deal less earnest than that of the Abbey and where the idea of the theatre a ..read more

  John Fanning writes: Twenty years ago Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, published the bestselling How Markets Work, an extended hymn of praise to global business corporations operating under free market conditions, arguing that they were the most extraordinary instrument of economic growth and individual wealth in history. He went on to say that globalisation had reduced inequality and poverty around the world in the last two centuries. Last year he published another lengthy analysis of the state of capitalism and came to radically different conclusions, a ..read more

Eve Patten writes: On December 10th, 1923, the poet WB Yeats addressed those gathered for the Nobel Prize ceremony banquet at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speaking of the honour brought to Ireland by his award for Literature, he acknowledged a circle of fellow Irish writers who had worked to free their country from provincialism and win for it ‘European recognition’. Such recognition was timely. The prize was widely seen as a gesture towards the drawing of Ireland into the European and wider international fold: coming as it did at the end of the civil war and coinciding with the first unstead ..read more