Add to this the fact that James is a polyglot – he reads in eight languages – a rock lyricist – frequently touring with musical collaborator Pete Atkin – and a tango enthusiast – he has converted the upstairs of…

Aldous Huxley, the first to adapt Austen for the screen, produced a script for Pride and Prejudice in 1939, but the producers insisted on simplifying the plot (“Five Gorgeous Beauties on a Mad-Cap Manhunt!” the publicity read), dismissing parts of…

It seems, to the mild irritation of both Prussian sages, that the women in the Marx and Engels households went into collective mourning following the hangings. In a letter to Engels, Marx described his daughter’s response: “Jenny goes in black…

The circumstances of his birth, some time between 1680 and 1690, and the ambiguities surrounding his death, circa 1734, provide an aura of mystique around the deeply enigmatic Richard Cantillon from Ballyheigue in Co Kerry. A contemporary, friend and later…

A good poem renews the language in restoring its truthfulness, its honesty of expression, avoiding the false and honeyed words of the courtier and the exploitation of the advertiser or lobbyist. It restores it further in re-exposing its beauty in…

Mulligan’s insinuations link up with one of the novel’s main themes, the convergence of Bloom and Stephen, when he tells the company how he saw “the sheeny” at the entrance to the library eyeing the backside of a nude female…

If Brian Moore’s work seemed “outsiderish” to the young Heaney in 1962, what must he have made of Hutchinson? He had been “outside” Ireland for well over a decade at this point, learning the languages of greater Europe – Catalan,…

More recently, pundits close to the Kremlin have intoned about “memory wars”, mainly in reaction to the critical views of Stalinist history advanced by Ukraine and the Baltic states in what is seen in Moscow as an attempt to denigrate…

Not so fortunate was his great rival, the correspondent (and now editor) of the New York Times, Bill Keller, who left Moscow a few months before the end and, having received a large advance to write the definitive account of…

Whigs like William Monsell were blackguarded by nationalists as corrupt place-seekers and toadies and Whig became a dirty word in the Irish lexicon – one thinks, not without a feeling of irony, of Francis Cruise O’Brien, father of Conor, berating…

Sean MacStiofáin, whose Irish ethnicity was according to Harte “based on a lone great-grandparent”, became a prominent leader of the IRA in the 1960s and early 1970s. Cathal Goulding, once a brother-in-arms and later an opponent, said of him that…