You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of... Read more »
Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel on Christmas Day 1988, as Soviet troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of a decade-long occupation. She expected to stay briefly. Instead,... Read more »
As anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search... Read more »
Cork Mental Hospital, also known as Our Lady’s, was once the longest building in Ireland: a monster of 19th-century gothic, much added to before its closure in the 1990s, that stares from... Read more »
Doireann Ní Ghríofa wrote much of her first book of prose, A Ghost in the Throat, sitting in her car on the top floor of a multistorey car park, having dropped her children... Read more »
Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,... Read more »
Iran and the Revolution by Homa Katouzian review – how the Islamic Republic was born | History books
As Wordsworth found in Paris after 1789, revolutions are deeply enthralling. There is nothing so bold, so self-sacrificing, so brave, so cruel as a revolutionary crowd. What’s more, revolutions have shaped the modern world.... Read more »
The word “hotel” is cognate with “hostel” and “hospital”, and for a few short years in the middle of the 20th century, one Paris establishment functioned as all three. Hôtel Lutetia sits... Read more »
Many readers, and surely most Irish readers, will finish this book in a state of white-knuckled rage, mingled with sorrow and at least a pang of guilt. It is a detailed, thoroughgoing... Read more »