Some people thought the guys in the group, and particularly the drummer, had no rights at all and should play what, and wherever, and for as long as they were told. But Joseph Haydn rapped his bow and stood up to them.

Franz Kafka died in an Austrian sanatorium from an incurable illness, aged forty, in 1924. Nothing could be done for him. There were some far more questionable deaths just up the road from there almost twenty years later.

One of Ireland’s greatest poets died fifty years ago today. So let’s make a bit of space for that too.

South Derry farming folk, sending their children away to board in Derry city, were assured that at least they’d get a good dinner. They didn’t.

Barra O Seaghdha considers just how easy it might have been at several steps along his ascending career path for Seamus Heaney to turn away from the past.

Let us not forget Seamus Heaney’s wonderful gifts as a prose writer.

Rita Thalmann, an historian born in Nuremberg who taught and published in France, was one of the last historians of Nazism to have personal experience of it in the disasters it brought on her family.

Yorkshire folk have a strong reputation for telling it like it is, which leaves them free to tell it like it isn’t.

It is perhaps the greatest of understatements to say that Ulster loyalism gets a bad press. But some people are working to help foster an articulacy in the community that might end up being beneficial to everyone.

Elmore Leonard, master of slick plots and sharp dialogue, has died aged eighty-seven. Here are his ten rules for writing.