Dublin Review of Books

09/08/2025

Equality, fairness, inherited wealth, and racial discrimination were all-consuming issues in postwar Britain. Atlee’s Labour government seemed to bring the chance to establish a socialist society of the kind that British intellectuals had been dreaming of for the previous fifty years and more. British public opinion was mostly repelled by the despotism prevailing in Soviet Russia and disgusted when the Russians invaded Hungary, but a moral question remained whether an egalitarian system was not superior in decency. READ MORE: https://drb.ie/articles/a-sublime-friendship/

15/04/2025

The rise of the national state saw a great decline in the mayhem and misery created by
feudal adventurers. Are we now going back to that? The spiraling wealth of private companies and their political ambitions now seriously threaten our ability to defend ourselves and to implement the kind of international co-operation between states that is vital for our survival. Read More: https://drb.ie/articles/the-case-for-the-state/

07/04/2025

Stephen Graham – who co-wrote and acted the lead adult male role in Adolescence has suggested that the murder of young girls by young boys has been on the increase: indeed, he has implied that this has reached near-epidemic proportions in the UK. In reality, the rates of all female homicides in the UK have fallen over the last ten years. The most common murderers of young girls under sixteen are not boys of a comparable age but an adult male – often a parent or step-parent.

https://drb.ie/a-strange-affair/

24/03/2025

Raphael Samuel and EP Thompson sought to resurrect the lives of the marginalised, in Thompson’s case the weavers and artisans, in Samuel’s itinerant labourers, gypsies, rough sleepers and travelling showmen. Read More: https://drb.ie/articles/written-on-water/

17/03/2025

Europe’s relationship with the United States has been one of subordination for some eighty years. Many in Europe found the supine a perfectly acceptable position, compensating with a cultural sneer. However, as the thunder of American hooves and talk of economic war is heard, alarm is growing. The fear of being squelched militarily by the Russians and economically by the Americans has concentrated minds. Read More: https://drb.ie/crash-baby-crash/

14/03/2025

Warsaw, doomed to disappear, became an invincible city, and the history of Poland is proudly cemented into its cityscape today. Even under communism, this reconstructed city of Russian merchants and royal pomp provided many people with a new start, including those formerly excluded from participation in urban life. Read More: https://drb.ie/articles/semper-invicta/

04/03/2025

As the millennials might put it, the world is falling apart and that’s been very hard on me. But I don’t mean to mock. We live in an age of anxiety. We have horror to help us think about this anxiety – horror, the genre that tells us we are right to be scared. Read More: https://drb.ie/articles/blame-it-on-the-boogeyman/

27/02/2025

MAGA is about the agreed division of the globe into zones of control, and the US wants a good chunk. Trump intends the US to wring concessions from subject peoples within its sphere of entitlement. A people’s place on the spectrum of subordination depends on their negotiating strength. The Palestinians have none. Asked on what basis he could propose the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Trump replied ‘US authority’. Read More: https://drb.ie/crash-baby-crash/

19/12/2024

The 2008 crash was exacerbated by neoliberal policies: no regulation of finance, privatisation, tax-cutting, boosting demand during a boom, a push for ever-lower taxation and the downgrading of the public sphere. Read More: https://drb.ie/articles/the-tale-of-a-tiger/

The Dublin Review of Books publishes long-form essays and shorter book reviews, blog entries, and details on forthcoming literary events in Ireland.

07/12/2024

Francis Hackett actively supported women’s rights and suffrage, as testified by ‘Where Women Disagree: The battle for the female vote’, an article he wrote for ‘The New Republic’ in 1915. His marriage to Signe Toksvig, a strongly feminist Danish-American writer also on the magazine staff, meant that the issue would remain at the centre of the couple’s lives. Read More: https://drb.ie/articles/a-progressive-abroad/

14/11/2024

In November 2008 I was in New York City when Barack Obama was elected. The city felt absolutely electric… The antithesis of this feeling, of course, came in November 2016, when I was also in New York, and saw a devastating lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. On the day of that election, I asked one cab driver if he felt excited about the vote, and he simply gave a sigh and rolled his eyes. This 2024 event feels different. The people gave Trump a victory in the popular vote. They handed him all of the swing states. They wanted him to make America great again. Read More:

James Moran writes: In November 2008 I was in New York City when Barack Obama was elected. The city felt absolutely electric. I can remember so clearly how, the day after the result, a young man serving sandwiches in a coffee shop dropped absolutely all of the behavioural codes of New York when I or...

14/11/2024

Lehmann had envisaged a life at the cottage for herself and the writer Goronwy Rees. The two had met at Bowen’s Court when Elizabeth Bowen had earmarked Rees for herself, but he made off with the younger and more attractive Lehmann. When Rosamond learned of her lover’s forthcoming marriage to someone else, there followed an episode of emotional unrestraint: ‘beating of head, lying senseless on the floor, calling for brandy, screams and cries’. But she pulled herself together, having no alternative. Read More:

The country living experiments of the writers Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann and Sylvia Townsend Warner