it is too early to say

John Banville, writing in the Guardian, gathers together some fragmentary moments to “provide a kind of kinetic vision, a peep-show display, of five and a bit decades in the life of a country – or two countries, depending on the shade of your politics.” Primarily a wonderful piece of writing, but also a fascinating meditation on the unnerving and invigorating effect of our own peculiar form of glasnost, identifying a current, familial, tentativeness of expression as that once cloaked by the “suffocating conformity and stasis” of the recent past. Updated over the foldChecking the print version I discovered that the article is lavishly illustrated with photographs from the last 50 years taken in Ireland by photographers from the Magnum Photos agency.. and, in fact, the article itself forms part of the introduction to a collection of those Magnum photographs that has just been published – Magnum Ireland

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