Roy Foster

Seamus Heaney’s letters confirm that he really was as nice as he seemed

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Seamus Heaney’s letters are full of energy and joie de vivre, but a darker note persists as the pressure of celebrity grows, says Roy Foster

Who planned Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson’s murder?

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…

Irish quartet: Beautiful World, Where Are You?, by Sally Rooney, reviewed

11 September 2021 9:00 am

The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…

Blindness and betrayal still bedevil Britain’s policy in Ireland

22 May 2021 9:00 am

Charles Péguy’s adage that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics is sharply illustrated by the development of the…

Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, by J.H. Maguire

The wildest Wilde of all: the scandalous life of Oscar’s father

15 December 2018 9:00 am

‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of…

Gerry Adams: from jail to the Dail

4 November 2017 9:00 am

When I recently asked a sardonic Northern Irish friend what historical figures Gerry Adams resembled, the tasteless reply came back:…

Was Éamon de Valera Ireland’s Franco?

14 November 2015 9:00 am

A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical…

Dublin’s docks were shelled from the Liffey by the British admiralty gunboat, the Helga, during the Easter Rising

Pitfalls on the road to the Rising

25 April 2015 9:00 am

The centenary of the Easter Rising is already being commemorated. Ahead of the flood of books that will follow, Roy Foster chooses two impressive, if sombre ones to be going on with