Michel de Montaigne set out from France in the summer of 1580 on a long journey which was to take him through Switzerland, Germany and Austria, over the Alps and into Italy. Many things interested him in the life of the Rome of Gregory XIII, but he was struck by how little of the ancient city remained.
Bruce Clunies-Ross remembers a festive meeting of the poet, a Danish expert on sheela-na-gigs and PV Glob, the royal antiquary who wrote of Tollund Man, the natural warmth of the gathering further enhanced by glasses of a Danish spirit flavoured with bog myrtle and a variety of Tuborg made specially for the Danish court.
Handsome men are a dime a dozen, believe me. And what are they going to do? Sit on you, that’s what they’ll do. But Raymond Chandler, oh Raymond, Raymond. There was a guy who knew how to treat furniture.
Germany, like Britain, is seeing the publication of a slew of books on the hundredth anniversary of the Great War.
Goethe, visiting Rome, stumbled upon Neddy, Bluebell and Dobbin receiving the blessings of the Lord. It made his day.
Co Armagh-born Sinead Morrissey is the winner of the prestigious British poetry prize, following in the footsteps of Heaney, Muldoon, Carson and Longley.
There are 100,000 fewer librarians in the United States than there were twenty years ago. And in Ireland we are planning to open libraries with no staff. Oh brave new world!
Newsweek is not letting those cheese-eating surrender monkeys off the hook.
Some notable writers left us in the course of 2013. The Guardian remembers some of them through quotations from their remarks about their work or writing, or politics.
Which is more important? Knowing something first or knowing it correctly? And is it possible that the frenetic pursuit of the first might make the second increasingly unlikely?