The worst that can happen to you on a theatre night out in Dublin is that you will be bored. At the end of the sixteenth century in Elizabethan London you ran the risk of being impressed into the army to die fighting the wild Irish.
On such a night as this, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe strode out by night in the Eternal City as the moon stood high and serene and the sweet wind gently kissed the trees – perhaps.
How much in common must a community have? Quite a lot, says Carl Henrik Fredriksson. At the very least a common public sphere. Because without it, Europe’s publics will be easy prey for those who know how to play the strings of history.
Young cock robin, extensive territory, HWP, D/D free, red breast, seeks hen. When a bird sings, it sings itself, and principally what species it is. A robin after all can do very little of any interest or to any purpose with a wren.
After the fall of France in 1940, Joyce became increasingly uncomfortable. In December he went back to his former home of Zurich, but died there suddenly in January of the following year.
Britain’s most valuable poetry prize, funded by the estate of TS Eliot, has gone to David Harsent for his collection Fire Songs.
The American novelist Kent Haruf, whose novels were set in small town Colorado, died late last year. ‘I don’t feel like death is right round the corner. But if it is, it’s a bigger corner than I thought it was.’”
It being January and a new year and all that, perhaps there are some locutions that we should think of putting on the back burner going forward.
John Henry Patterson, born in Ballymahon, Co Longford, was a soldier, then a big-cat hunter in Africa and eventually a sponsor of Zionism and the creation of an Israeli fighting force. He died in California in 1947 and was reinterred in Israel last month.
John Carey thought that Oxford academics were a privileged bunch who had a nerve telling other people what to think. Irish professors are not so rarefied a breed. Perhaps more of them should occasionally peek out and contribute to public debate.