Public Intellectual Series: George Orwell – A Crucial Man for Our Time
George Orwell has never been unfashionable, and is in vogue now more than ever. His…
Browsing: History and Economics
Public Intellectuals: Jürgen Habermas
It came as a surprise when the editor of Cassandra Voices divulged recently that he…
Reclaiming from Conservatism Perhaps the Greatest Irish Intellectual Edmund Burke
A past competition, now sadly in abeyance, used to involve arguing over who was the…
Roger Casement’s Example Inspires me to Protect the Amazon and its People
Over the course of 2019 there has been a sharp increase in deforestation in the…
Albert Camus and the Decline of the Public Intellectual
But again, and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares…
Gluttony, Gastronomy, and the Origins of ‘French’ Food
As French President, François Mitterrand enjoyed his fair share of sumptuous feasts in the haute…
My Grandmother’s Life Under the Third Reich and Behind the Iron Curtain
Irene H. Going into your house, I sat in the conservatory waiting for the door…
Confronting ‘the Russia in Ourselves’
The Russian bear looms in the English-speaking imagination as savage and barbaric, but with a…
Mary Beatrice Midgley – An Appreciation
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a giant among philosophers, though she only published the first of her…
A Life in Love with Music
It is a river vast, both wide and deep that corrals out joy and sadness;…
An Irish Poet Attains Greatness
I am sticking my neck out to declare: Micheal O’Siadhail’s book-length poem, The Five Quintets, is…
Pandora’s Slippery Box
It is difficult to speak of abstract forces without personalising them, or investing them, magically,…
Ancient Irish Sagas
The following is a short retelling and interpretation of a number of Irish sagas, including…
The Origins of Poetic Creation
We can only imagine how poetry entered human consciousness. I intuit that its emergence was…
History’s Dead Hand on the Middle East
Last month’s opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem served to re-ignite Palestinian rage against…
Big Plans in Little Jerusalem
June 1985: I was at work in my garden shed, when I heard someone talking.…
Venezuela Sinks in the ‘Excrement of the Devil’
It is as if anyone writing about Venezuela must pass through the red channel, for…
Could Torture Ever be ‘Right’?
The recent appointment of Gina Haspel as CIA Director is a sign of a growing…
Post-Modern Decrepitude
If you are complaining about Climate Change, Brexit, Donald Trump, and all the cozening of…
Twosome Twiminds in Casement and Joyce
Where to begin the story of Roger Casement, humanitarian crusader, knight of the British realm,…