Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
Leonardo da Vinci, the oldest of the Italian High Renaissance artists, died five hundred years ago, on 2 May 1519. Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 near the village of Vinci, from which he takes his name. His mother, Caterina, the daughter of a poor farmer, worked as a […]
There are few people more famous in the political song movement than Pete Seeger. Along with his contemporaries Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie, Seeger represented the might of song in highlighting the common cause, strengthening courage, and inspiring resistance. Song was their weapon in this struggle for a fair, equal […]
Living in an Armed Patriarchy: Public Protest, Domestic AcquiescenceLynda Walker This booklet takes its reader back in time to the years from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, years that shook the North of Ireland profoundly in many ways. It is an example of the kind of writing about […]
This year’s James Connolly Festival, running from Tuesday 7 May to Sunday 12 May, will build on the great success of previous incarnations. The programme will include contributions on a wide range of topics, continuing the commitment to exploring left-wing politics and ideas through discussion, arts, and culture. While the […]
■ Michael Pierse (ed.), A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2018). This is a book to be welcomed. It is the first study of such scope, attempting, as it does, to present and analyse the entire body of Irish working-class literature. It begins with the first writings […]
■ Liam O’Flaherty, Hollywood Cemetery: A Vision of the World to Come (Nuascéalta, 2019). The veteran film-maker Bob Quinn will launch this new edition of Liam O’Flaherty’s novel Hollywood Cemetery, long out of print, at 6 p.m. on Wednesday 10 April at Galway City Library. Published in London in 1935 […]
Priscilla Metscher, Pioneers of Women’s Emancipation in Ireland (Connolly Books, Dublin, 2018) This fascinating study stands out as a commentary on Irish fighters for women’s emancipation, written from a Marxist viewpoint. The author, Priscilla Metscher, examines in turn the ideas and activities of Mary Ann McCracken, Anna Doyle Wheeler, William […]
The author Anna Burns from Belfast has won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman. The chairperson of the judges, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, described it as “incredibly original,” saying that “none of us has ever read anything like this before.” Burns is the first winner of […]
Russian cinema today explores capitalism against the backdrop of a past socialist experience. Open-minded visitors to former socialist states, and particularly to Russia, will come across this living memory and frequently an acknowledgement of the loss of humanist values since the defeat of socialism in Europe. It is interesting too, […]
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o turned eighty this year. He has written prolifically. Arguably his most famous (non-fiction) book is Decolonising the Mind, about the constructive role that language plays in national culture, history, and identity. The reclaiming of African languages as keepers of memory, of African history, became central to Ngũgĩ’s […]
The 11th of November 2018 is the centenary of the ending of the First World War. During that bloody slaughter the propagandists described it as “the war to end all wars.” A hundred years and as many wars later, the militarists in the United States and Europe—many of them the […]
Paul Stewart, Tommy McKearney, Gearóid Ó Machail, Patricia Campbell, Brian Garvey, Between Sectarianism and Neo-Liberalism: The State of Northern Ireland and the Democratic Deficit (Glasgow: Vagabond Voices, 2018) If, like me, you mourn the loss of intelligent debate among Irish republicans as they descend into the gobbledegook of bourgeois democracy, […]
Panos Cosmatos’s film Mandy (2018) has received widespread acclaim for its visually arresting murder-and-revenge story, set in a heavily aestheticised 1980s rural America (thanks to the cinematography of Benjamin Loeb). This article is not so much a review of the film as a critical assessment of some of the political […]
Thro’ the shattered mainstream of life the waste land bears testimony to the shadow Hear mothers wail for dead children whose fathers slave to re-erect the rubble Upon the rubble their fathers erected This alter for sacrificed generations Build fast! Build furious! Erect the citadels of despair Light high in […]
Twenty years ago, on 8 October 1998, the communist writer José Saramago became the first Portuguese author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The first fifty years of Saramago’s life were defined by the fascist dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974 and his active resistance against it. […]
Robin Hood, the legendary outlaw known throughout the world, has an unusual connection with Ireland, and an even stranger connection with the communist movement. No-one knows for certain whether Robin Hood ever existed or was based on a real individual. There are records of people named Robin Hood or similar […]