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3 April 2026 - Adetswil

When I picked up Maurice Curtis' Temple Bar: A History several years ago in Dublin I thought that it was a history of the bright red tavern I visited there in 2022. Having also read The Search for God and Guinness over a decade ago I assumed (incorrectly) that this was a normal sort of literature for Dublin and the "Bar" in the title referred to a bar in the sense of a pub. It is the city of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde after all. However, to my surprise the "Bar" in Temple Bar refers instead to a bar in the sense of a sand bank on the shore of a river, in this case the Liffey. Temple Bar is, in fact, the name for that whole section of Dublin on the southern bank of the Liffey! Curtis' book can be plodding at times, but generally it is an interesting history of the buildings and streets of and the characters who lived in Temple Bar.