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Lessons from Scottish Schools
Read more: Lessons from Scottish SchoolsLindsay Paterson discusses Scotland’s educational decline and the social inequality of attainment.
Q&A with Michelle Honeybun, author of “‘His Vest, I Perceive, Is But Padded with Cotton!”: John Bull in Cotton Famine Poetry during the American Civil War (1861–5)’
This interview explores how John Bull became a literary and political figure in Victorian newspaper poetry during the American Civil War and the Cotton Famine.
The Pharmakon of Shame
Séan Kennedy and Joseph Valente, editors of Irish Shame, explore the intricate relationship between empathy and shame in this blog.
5 places where modernism survived
Adapting or recasting the formal experiments of their modernist forebears...Here is a brief tour of five places where modernism survived well into the second half of the twentieth century.
Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry
The work and life of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) were, in Bill Clinton’s words, a gift to the world: ‘His mind, heart, and his uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives.’
Poetry and the Dream of a Gift without Return
"The gift—what we call “the gift” and “giving”—appears to have at least two distinct functions, and one would be hard pressed to decide between them."
The Burns Supper: A New Field of Study
By Dr Paul Malgrati Over the past 220 years, the Burns Supper has become the quintessential festival of Scottish culture, identity, and gastronomy. Who would have thought, back in 1801 as nine admirers of Robert Burns held a private memorial…
Burns Chronicle: The Oldest Scottish Literature Journal in the World?
By the Editors & Reviews Editor, the Burns Chronicle Almost 130 years ago, in 1892, enthusiasts started publishing the Burns Chronicle and the journal has continued ever since, conveying articles of interest and news among Burns Clubs and admirers of…
Four Irish Persephones
By Virginie Trachsler The young Persephone is gathering flowers in a meadow when her uncle Hades, god of the underworld, rises through a crack in the earth and abducts her on his golden chariot. Her mother Ceres wanders the earth…
Venus Voluptas: The Desire of Gods and Men
Thomas Nail writes about Venus as the desire of gods and men in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. She is not only the external object of desire of the other gods and of men; she is the desire itself.