Fintan O'Toole To Give This Year's WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture
Will look at the distinction between national pride and national vanity
Left: WB Yeats. Right: Fintan O'Toole
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August 23, 2026
An autumn tradition in Bedford Park returns this year with one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers making an appearance. The 2026 WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture will be delivered by Fintan O’Toole on Tuesday 6 October, exploring the charged territory where art, national identity, pride and vanity meet — themes that run through Yeats’s life and work, and through politics today.
The evening, titled National Pride & National Vanity: Yeats, Art & Patriotism, takes place at St Michael & All Angels Church . As Cahal Dallat, founder of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Project, notes, many regulars have already booked — and with good reason. These lectures are always full, always lively, and are now illuminated by the presence of Conrad Shawcross’s Enwrought Light, the shimmering sculpture that anchors Yeats’s legacy in the neighbourhood where he once lived and wrote.
O’Toole’s lecture returns to the crucible of Yeats’s early creative life. It was here that a neighbour commissioned the young poet’s first staged play, setting him on the path that led to the founding of the Abbey Theatre — the institution George Bernard Shaw insisted was “born in Bedford Park”. O’Toole has long written about the Abbey’s role in Ireland’s independence, but also about the moment Yeats confronted a more troubling truth: that some audiences prefer art that flatters their self-image rather than challenges it. When Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars exposed the realities of post-Revolution Dublin, Yeats drew a sharp line between national pride and national vanity.
That distinction, O’Toole argues, is not confined to Yeats’s Ireland of a century ago. It echoes in today’s politics — local, national and international — wherever cultural identity becomes a battleground and art is asked to serve as mirror, banner or shield.
O’Toole brings decades of scholarship and commentary to the subject. Author of more than twenty books, official biographer of Seamus Heaney, drama critic for The Irish Times, contributor to The New York Review of Books, former BBC presenter and Princeton lecturer, he has been described by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading intellectuals, “despite not being British or living in Britain”.
The lecture begins at 7.30pm, tickets £15, and early booking is strongly advised.
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