Volume 50, Number 8 · May 15, 2003
Keeping Busy
By John Banville
The Kick: A Memoir
by Richard Murphy
Granta, 379 pp., $24.95
If an Irishman's home is his castle—or his coffin, in Leopold Bloom's mordant variation on the old saw—then certainly the poet Richard Murphy has seen more crenelations rise and fall than most of his fellow countrymen. Murphy comes from the Anglo-Irish upper middle class, those Protestants 'planted' in Ireland in Cromwellian times and earlier, a people for whom the house, and especially the Big House, was less a place of shelter, comfort, and privacy than a symbol in stone and brick of a separate and stubbornly enduring culture.
Review, 3663 words
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