Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies concludes its 2024-2025 series with two upcoming events. On March 20, Irish novelist and playwright Niall Williams reads from his work at 5:00 p.m. at Labyrinth Books in an event cosponsored by Princeton’s Humanities Council and Department of English and Labyrinth Books. The reading is free and open to the public, and no tickets are required. On March 21 at 4:30 p.m., author, essayist, and Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole delivers a lecture entitled “Unmasking Conspiracy: Philip Graves and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The lecture, which takes place in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau St. on the Princeton University campus, requires free tickets, available in advance through University Ticketing. Both locations are accessible venues, and guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.

Niall Williams. Photo credit: John Kelly

Niall Williams was born in Dublin. He is the author of ten novels, including History of the Rain, which was longlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, and the international bestseller Four Letters of Love, for which he also wrote the screenplay. Now a major motion picture starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter, and Gabriel Byrne, Four Letters of Love premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival in February. His 2019 novel, This Is Happiness, was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize. His latest novel, Time of the Child, was published in the U.S. in November. Lucy Popescu, reviewing the book for The Observer, shares: “A slow-burning, finely crafted novel about second chances, humanity and familial love, Time of the Child rewards close reading. While outwardly everything remains the same, interior lives are profoundly altered. Williams’s descriptive language is extraordinary–his use of understatement and irony artfully deployed, his characterization sublime.” Williams lives in Kiltumper in County Clare, Ireland.

One of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, O’Toole will give the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture on March 21.

O’Toole notes that we live in an age of conspiracy theory and “fake news” but emphasizes these are not new phenomena. He contends the most toxic forgery of all time is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which falsely purports to be the record of secret meetings of Jewish leaders plotting to take over the world. It was used as the basis for the most violent antisemitic propaganda of the 20th century and continues to circulate today.

Fintan O’Toole. Photo credit: Nick Bradshaw / The Irish Times

In 1921, the Irish journalist Philip Graves was the first writer to expose The Protocols as a fake and to show how it was manufactured. Graves, who came from a distinguished literary family, used the techniques of literary criticism to analyze the text of The Protocols and published his findings in the London Times.

O’Toole points out that Graves is now largely forgotten. Yet in his lecture, in memory of the great scholar-poet Robert Fagles, O’Toole tells the story of how Graves revealed the truth. He argues that what Graves managed to do is not merely of historical importance; it resonates strongly with contemporary dilemmas and shows that critical skills are not marginal but vital to the survival of democracy and decency.

O’Toole is advising editor of The New York Review of Books and writes for The Irish Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. From 2012 to 2024, he was the Visiting Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. O’Toole’s books on politics include the bestsellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, which was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2022; Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain; and Ship of Fools. He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, the Orwell Prize, the European Press Prize and the Robert Silvers Prize for Journalism. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. In 2023, O’Toole was named an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

The Fund for Irish Studies Series is co-chaired this year by Jane Cox, Director of Princeton’s Program in Theater & Music Theater, and Robert Spoo, Princeton’s Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters.

The series, co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.”

The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the series, which is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan Jr. ’45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.