Articles currently available on The Atlantic Monthly's Web site

• Two Deaths in Rathmines, June 1999
  A memory of loss from the distant Dublin childhood of the writer and former diplomat.

• Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist, October 1996
  In the multiracial American future Jefferson will not be thought of as the Sage of Monticello. His flaws are beyond redemption. The sound you hear is the crashing of a reputation.

• The Roots of My Preoccupations, July 1994
  In this, his second autobiographical essay, the author tells of his government career in Catholic Ireland near the end of the Second World War, of his discovery of the major themes of his intellectual life, and of the motives that impelled the Irish Prime Minister to pay a (universally condemned) condolence call on the German legation at the news of Hitler's death.

• Twentieth-Century Witness: Ireland's Fissures, and My Family's, January 1994
  The author takes us back to the 1916 "Easter Rising" in Dublin to trace the tragic part his family played in that violent episode. Beneath this dramatic portrait of a family and a people sundered by politics, however, O'Brien is ever on the hunt for the lethal mixing of God with country which has spilled oceans of blood throughout this century of nationalism and which, from Bosnia to Northern Ireland, still curses the world.

• Why Israel Can't Take "Bold Steps" for Peace, October 1985
  Political reality in the Middle East.