Three of Carcanet Press’s finest emerging poets, all distinguished alumnae of Carcanet’s bestselling New Poetries anthology series who have gone on to publish highly successful debut collections. Sat 11 June, 6.30pm.
Two years after the opening of the Nazi extermination camps there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting in Britain, resulting in the burning of synagogues, destruction of property and desecration of graveyards.
Not everyone in Irish political life supported women’s suffrage. In fact the idea was strongly opposed by many in the Irish Parliamentary Party and by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Nevertheless, the independent state managed to get in well before the United Kingdom.
Lord Byron, exiled after a welter of scandals in England, found Venice a good place to pursue his normal interests of debauchery and adultery. But you can’t hack that all the time without taking a rest.
Our friends the Czechs want us to call their country by a different name. But as all citizens of Ireland, Eire, the Republic, the South and the Twenty-six Counties know, this is not always a simple matter.
The question of whether Britain should stay in the EU or leave will be settled as a purely transactional one: is it likely to be good for business or not? There is no point in appealing to a European vision for Britain has never had one.
The Hungarian writer and Nobel prizewinner Imre Kertész, who has died aged eighty-six, was deported to Auschwitz aged fourteen. Pondering on that experience, and more broadly on totalitarianism, was to provide him with the material for his life’s literary work.
The sentencing of Radovan Karadžic for crimes including ordering the Srebrenica massacre has been greeted as a cause of satisfaction. But what about all the other preceding massacres? When, asks Ed Vulliamy, will we see justice dispensed for them?
English Catholic writers like GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were very popular in Irish schools in the last century, Chesterton’s prediction of the demise of Protestantism being particularly valued. But their entrenched antisemitism, or indeed any antisemitism, found very few takers in Ireland.
A conference to be held in Poland this autumn will consider the idea of solidarity, and by implication its current relative absence in Europe. Are there limits to how much solidarity can realistically be expected? Can we bring it back, or will ‘national egotism’ triumph?