Word: irishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
English professor Helen Vendler invoked the words of an English poet, Robert Graves, to describe the decidedly Irish Seamus Heaney, who read from his poems to a sold out audience at Sanders Theater yesterday. “But nothing promised that is not performed,” Vendler quoted, inspired by her colleague’s tireless devotion to his students during his years as both the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. When Heaney, a Nobel laureate, took the stage, he described it as “one of the greatest...
Kent calls these works tribunal plays, and in them he has probed German and Bosnian-Serb war crimes, the sale of arms to Iraq, the suicide of British weapons expert David Kelly and the massacre of Irish civil rights marchers by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday. The plays are riveting in their attention to detail and at times heartbreaking, as when a visibly haunted former soldier in Srebrenica recounts his forced participation in the slaughter of Muslims. "We've become the BBC of the theater," Kent says. "We've become a trusted voice...
...Given Day By Dennis Lehane; out now Wait, what is Lehane's name doing on a 700-page epic about union politics, a flu epidemic, immigration, baseball, an Irish cop and a black fugitive in Boston in 1919? He's gone big and literary on us, and the results are part home run and part homework. But he hasn't forgotten where he came from: there's great pulp storytelling in here...
...Obviously this is an internal division among Muslims. The case of Iraq is a particularly important one because Iraq is a country that has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni domination. I would borrow a word from the Irish history to describe it and say it's the "Shi'ite Ascendancy." Since the days of the medieval Caliphate, the Sunnis remained the ruling group. They monopolized all of the positions of power and authority. Now, for the first time, the Shi'ite has access to power as they must inevitably in any real democracy, and so far its going...
Early in his presidency, Sarkozy engineered a compromise to turn the rejected E.U. constitution into the Lisbon treaty, which was ratified by the French parliament. That figures prominently in the category of good moves. France bears no responsibility for the Irish no, which largely emptied the French diplomatic success of any significance. The highly symbolic rapprochement of France with the U.S. was also both legitimate and necessary. Does this reconciliation necessarily imply France's full return to NATO and the reinforcement of France's military presence in Afghanistan? The answer is yes, but with conditions. The blood tax paid...