More gin for the editor please
William Maginn, who died 170 years ago today, was a child prodigy from Cork who became a brilliant newspaper editor in London. But sadly, the drink got to him.
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Home is a sad place
With his fortieth birthday the realisation came to Philip Larkin that he had done nothing with the `fat fillet-steak’ part of life.
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The sentences in my head
László Krasnahorkai talks to George Szirtes about how he writes and what he reads.
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Why they went to war
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.
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Forty days of sunshine
The Book of Kells will be joined by some other outstanding Irish manuscripts on display in Trinity College Dublin in 2016.
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A bookselling institution
The famous Foyle’s bookshop in central London is moving to a spectacularly beautiful new premises just down the road from its traditional Charing Cross Road pitch.
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If you gotta go …
Former French prime minister Michel Rocard, in a resounding ‘J’accuse!’, tells the British that if they want to leave the EU they should just do that, and quickly too. Really, they’ve done quite enough damage inside.
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Sumer is icumen in – or not
A new book celebrates the seasons. But tell me again, how many of them are there?
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Adventures in Egypt
An episode from the early 1880s shows a young Augusta Gregory sympathising with an oppressed people and its revolutionary leaders – far from Ireland.
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Penguin relaunches Pelican
A hugely successful experiment in popular intellectual publishing, established in the 1930s and abandoned at the end of the Thatcherite 1980s, is being relaunched.