We may have left certain practices of our childhood and youth behind, but they haven’t gone away, you know.

The fables, Seamus Heaney has written, that corpus of tales of innocent or treacherous beasts and birds, were once part of the common oral culture of Europe, a store of folk wisdom as pervasive and unifying at vernacular level as the doctrines of Christianity were in the higher realms of scholastic culture.

As a child, Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz was bought a beautiful notebook. So beautiful he didn't want to write anything unworthy in it.

Saul Bellow judged that many people he knew had made too much of an investment in the difficult texts of Marxism to ever accept that it no longer had very much to say about reality. Can we say that about any later intellectual fashions?

Miss Fox, of Fleet Street near Charing Cross, though of uncertain family, unknown fortune and indifferent parts, was a young woman of very definite opinions, many of them other people's.

Modernising influences in Turkey tried to impose a purely Turkic language with a new alphabet in place of the rich mixture of Turkic, Arabic and Persian which had comprised the language of the Ottoman empire. This led to a few problems.

What kind of conspiracy is the European Union anyway? A Papist one, or a German one?

Some of our new fellow Europeans don't like the government knowing their business. Sure, they're only human.

Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, now 94, insists that the proper attitude for his countrymen and women to adopt to Poland involves a continuing humility and patience.

Noam Chomsky is unimpressed by the great minds of European postmodernism.

Terry Eagleton will have no truck with the modern world and its noise and its gadgets and its silly babbling. Fair play to him.

Some non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, and particularly the French, seem prone to national panic in the face of la globalisation. But rumours and fears of cultural extinction are greatly exaggerated.

Oliver Bernard was a poet and an acclaimed translator of Rimbaud. He got up to a few other things as well.

The American minimalist short story writer follows Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro and Philip Roth.

Margaret Fuller, writing in 1840, had some very pertinent things to say about people who have opinions and like to sound off.

There is still time to book for Dan Brown in Dublin and hear how he does it.

Philip Larkin is still among Britain's most read poets, which must testify to a certain appetite for gloom. Alan Bennett however finds it is sometimes all a little too much.

Dancing in the Regency period may have looked from a distance like a straitlaced and buttoned-up affair, but it was vital to the reproduction of 'good society' and charged with excitement and sexual energy.

A new study examines silence in the Christian tradition and its use for good and evil.

Liam Carson has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature/Ondaatje prize for his memoir of his parents, Call Mother a Lonely Field.