Noam Chomsky is unimpressed by the great minds of European postmodernism.

Terry Eagleton will have no truck with the modern world and its noise and its gadgets and its silly babbling. Fair play to him.

Some non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, and particularly the French, seem prone to national panic in the face of la globalisation. But rumours and fears of cultural extinction are greatly exaggerated.

Oliver Bernard was a poet and an acclaimed translator of Rimbaud. He got up to a few other things as well.

The American minimalist short story writer follows Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro and Philip Roth.

Margaret Fuller, writing in 1840, had some very pertinent things to say about people who have opinions and like to sound off.

There is still time to book for Dan Brown in Dublin and hear how he does it.

Philip Larkin is still among Britain’s most read poets, which must testify to a certain appetite for gloom. Alan Bennett however finds it is sometimes all a little too much.

Dancing in the Regency period may have looked from a distance like a straitlaced and buttoned-up affair, but it was vital to the reproduction of ‘good society’ and charged with excitement and sexual energy.

A new study examines silence in the Christian tradition and its use for good and evil.