Robert Gregory

7 results

The “cure” involved a rubber ball, filled with carbolic acid, the fumes of which users inhaled to flush any badness out of their systems. Photograph: iStock
Out of puff – Frank McNally on a ‘cure’ for flu that made legal history

When advertisers make grandiose claims for a product, suggesting it will increase your longevity or make you sexually irresistible, or whatever, they (...)

The imposing ruins of Tyrone House, near the village of Kilcolgan, Co Galway, January 1968. The house was destroyed by the local IRA unit during the War of Independence. Photograph: RDImages/Epics/Getty Images
Galway, 1920: Black and Tan with revolver shot in all directions during gunfight

The Revolution Files is a collection of articles detailing one incident in each of Ireland’s 32 counties during the revolutionary years, from 1916 to (...)

Maj Robert Gregory: Yeats’s ‘Airman’ was one of the most famous Irish casualties of the first World War
‘Those that I fight I do not hate’ – An Irishman’s Diary on Robert Gregory

The poet WB Yeats managed to distil the dilemma of Irish nationalist servicemen in the British forces into just two lines in his great poem An Irish A(...)

Flu may have been at least indirectly responsible for the still-mysterious demise of Maj Robert Gregory, the ‘Irish Airman’ who, in the title of a famous poem by WB Yeats, foresaw his death
Germ warfare – An Irishman’s Diary about Maj Robert Gregory and the Spanish flu

There was nothing especially Spanish about the Spanish flu: the global pandemic that, in two years beginning a century ago this month, killed more peo(...)

Creative power: WB Yeats as a young poet. Photograph: Bain/Library of Congress
Denis Donoghue: Why WB Yeats matters
  • Books
  • June 10, 2015, 01:00

Many years ago I gave a lecture at Queen’s University Belfast on a theme I have long since forgotten. After the lecture Prof Singh of the Italian d(...)

Auctioneer Colm Farrell dressed as WB Yeats at Thoor Ballylee near Gort, Co Galway. Farrell will auction a number of items at the tower, which is the former residence of the poet, on Sunday, May 31st, to raise funds to re-open the tower. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy
Grand plans for WB Yeats’s ‘invincible tower’ at Gort

Not everyone would pick a draughty old Norman keep for a home to grow old in, but then not everyone shared the mindset of WB Yeats. “I am makin(...)

Irish outlook: George Bernard Shaw. Photograph: Ullstein Bild via Getty
Lost for words: Irish writing on the first World War

In June 1915 WB Yeats wrote to his American friend and patron John Quinn about the Great War then raging across Europe. It was, he said, “merely th(...)