6th August 2025
Scotland's greatest living Irish Historian on an Irish publication of Scottish writers on the state of Scotland. Owen Dudley Edwards casts a critical eye over the recently published Irish Pages Scotland issue.
4th April 2025
Owen Dudley Edwards rewrites the understanding of genre and sees satire as a form of literary criticism. His knowledge of mid-twentieth century literature is both encyclopaedic and peculiar. Wodehouse, for example, is always an anomaly, but using his works as a handrail to guide us round the voids created by a current day fascist is weirdly novel.
21st December 2024
As an historian of American politics, who followed John F Kennedy round the USA on his election campaign in the 60s, is there a writer with a longer view of the Presidency than Irishman Owen Dudley Edwards? - It takes a bit of wit too, to be wider than the current President-Elect. Here is the perennial Edwards, as always, delivering more - as Marx said of Lincoln - than he promised.
8th June 2024
What has been the scope of bigotry, racism, oppression and prejudice? Owen Dudley Edwards telescopes a whole history of the entanglement of those evils with the struggle for freedom, justice and truth into a compassionate and humane reading (and most importantly, an Irish reading) of the cornering and silencing of Diane Abbott, who was the first ever black woman elected to the Westminster Parliament.
7th February 2024
Putting the writing and rewriting of state affairs by politicians in a long and broadly detailed context, Owen Dudley Edwards wonders if 'The self-destruction of the would-be partisan is becoming a literary form in UK political life'? Reviews of new books by Theresa May, Chris Bryant and Rory Stewart.
9th May 2023
Scotland's foremost Irish historian and Ireland's finest Jockstorian, Owen Dudley Edwards, finds a textless chronicle of the farcical and chaotic politics of Jockland in the 2020s. It's to be sung swiftly, though it's no song of Solomon. The rulers from Laputa assume they have (in the jargon of the period) 'taken back control', but none of them can actually determine where Jockland is, or if it even exists ...
31st January 2023
From the sophistry of the Saorstat to the solecism of Saor Alba - what, if any, are the parallels between Irish Revolutionary relations with the UK, and the relations between the current crop of Scottish and UK politicians? Owen Dudley Edwards addresses an independent question.
18th June 2022
What is the constitution of an institution? Who decides in and for an institution? What happens when an institution rejects us, or when we destroy an institution? Owen Dudley Edwards meditates ...
13th April 2022
Bunteresque? Falstaffian? BoJo-vian? England always gets the best. Owen Dudley Edwards on the rich history of greedy liars in English political and cultural life - Enlisting the critique of George Orwell, PG Wodehouse and fellow Irishman George Bernard Shaw along the way.