Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World Jane Ohlmeyer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 368pps., hb, $36 On 1 May 1169, thirty Anglo-Norman knights landed at Bannow strand in County Wexford, to aid the usurped Diarmait MacMurrough reclaim the throne of Leinster. There had always been interactions among the Isles, but those knights… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → Derek Turner
“Glory of Spayne”
I started awake as the plane came into land. The cactuses along the edges of the runway suggested even to my stupefied senses that we were no longer in Birmingham. Distinctly un-English heat fell heavily on our heads and draped itself around our shoulders as we walked into the terminal below the giant, magic word,… Continue reading
Alliteration once and always
Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival – A Critical Anthology Dennis Wilson Wise (ed.), Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2023, 407pps., US$65 The phrase ‘alliterative poetry’ immediately connotes archaism, and a literary tradition almost moribund since the mid-fifteenth century. University of Arizona academic Dennis Wilson Wise suggests that the form has been revived… Continue reading
Prince Harming
Spare, Prince Harry, London: Transworld, 2023, hb., 410pps., £28 There are times when English feelings for their royal family come close to obsession. Through all the tumults of England’s trajectory, its monarchy has formed an imaginative bond between Anglo-Saxon origins and today’s Kingdom – celebrated by its greatest writers, and extolled as an exemplar of… Continue reading
Empire state of mind
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar, London: William Collins, 2023, 480pps., $34.99 Ideologues are frequently performative, but sometimes they are simply pantomimic. One of today’s major stock villains is the British Empire – seen in melodramatic minds as a swaggering dastard, slashing through global history like Captain Hook in murderous search of Peter Pan and… Continue reading
From myth to mob-rule, and back
The Prophets of Doom Neema Parvini, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2023, pb., 227pps., £14.95 The West, it is said, is modernity, but if it is, there is melancholy at its core. Our most confident centuries have subsisted in the shadow of Rome – our Ozymandian awareness that the greatest powers must pass, and all empires will… Continue reading
Writing ruins
Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain Matthew Green, London: Faber, 2022, hb, 358pps, £20 An unknown Anglo-Saxon wrote The Ruin, a poem about Roman remains, which starts: “This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it / Courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying…” Ethnic inheritors took up this mordant tradition, especially after the… Continue reading
Refracted future
The Mirror, Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10 Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R…. Continue reading
The ghost coast
Adam ran his hand over his balding scalp. The dunes shimmered all around – expectant, empty of any movement except his, although he knew rare beetles trundled through rough grass, and he could hear toads, chirring contentedly somewhere amongst orchids and buckthorn. He couldn’t see the sea from here, but it would be far out… Continue reading
Fighting Irish
I have always had a weakness for the Regency period, and a dilettantish interest in dangerous exertion. In Regency Rogue (1976), Patrick Myler tells the story of Dan Donnelly (1788?-1820), one of the most renowned of the bare-knuckle boxers, a sport intimately associated with that rakish period. “No other man”, observes the author, “who ever… Continue reading