You put your right leg in, your right leg out. In, out, in, out. You shake it all about. You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around. That’s what it’s all about.

Gilbert White, an 18th century country parson and naturalist, wrote in sumptuous detail of the animal and bird life he observed around him. Here he is on the varieties of birdsong.

With his fortieth birthday the realisation came to Philip Larkin that he had done nothing with the `fat fillet-steak’ part of life.

László Krasnahorkai talks to George Szirtes about how he writes and what he reads.

Why did the soldiers join up and go to be slaughtered in France, Belgium or Gallipoli? Sometimes because the misery of their lives made them think that anything would be better.

An episode from the early 1880s shows a young Augusta Gregory sympathising with an oppressed people and its revolutionary leaders – far from Ireland.

John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet who died 150 years ago, is not getting the commemoration he deserves in Britain.

Penguin books has embarked on a programme to republish all 75 of George Simenon’s Maigret novels. Will the phlegmatic Parisian policeman captivate a new generation?

In May 2004 ten new members, including eight from central and eastern Europe, joined the European Union. Have the effects of this major expansion on the union’s capacity to define what it is been entirely positive?

Some people think you can say anything you like about priests. While others don’t. In the fourteenth century, if Chaucer was anything to go by, there wasn’t much you couldn’t say.