Social and political life, Pearse’s St Enda’s, the role of women and the part played by Dublin Protestants in the Rising are the subjects of four free lunchtime talks in Dublin in February and March.
The eminent Italian novelist, critic, journalist and philosopher of books and libraries has read his last. Though a preeminent man of books, he was rather relaxed about the fact that there were things he hadn’t read.
Captain Jack White was a supporter of James Connolly and of his political creed of syndicalism. Was syndicalism just another type of socialism or was it something much more radical and revolutionary altoghether?
At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century many people were beginning to take the measure of the parasitical landowning classes. None put it all quite so succinctly as Robert Burns, born on this day in 1759.
Fingers are being pointed at Hungary and Poland, accusing them of turning their back on European values and breeding an ugly xenophobia and populism. There may be some truth in this, but are they the only places where extreme political forces are thriving?
Journalists, according to Frederic Raphael, are the short order chefs of the writing world. With the great Joseph Roth you got more than wedges and coleslaw.
Like Floyd Mayweather Junior in boxing, Costa poetry winner Don Paterson is not just technically immaculate; he hurts, hitting hard and gifted with a true fighter’s armoury of punches.
In the German rental model there are considerable advantages for those renting, primarily security of tenure and protection against arbitrary increases. There are long-term advantages for landlords too. But principally housing is regarded as a social asset, which ensures citizens are housed.
I was like ‘rules matter, clarity matters’ and this like 70-year-old professor of linguistics was like ‘keep your hair on, you’re so uptight, it’s about expressing yourself”. Jeez!
Nancy Mitford was one of the famous Mitfords. Her sister Unity fell in love with Hitler and shot herself when war broke out. Nancy’s sparkling and mildly satirical novels of class have been reissued by Penguin with new covers that can only be described as spiffing.
Just over a decade ago, Jane Clarke was a little-known newcomer to the Irish poetry scene. Today she is one of its most dependable talents. She is studious and industrious, a crafter of gleaming songlines with clipped, shimmering rectangles of illumination on the page. Her new book, ‘Coracle’, is a gathering up of style and strength.
Paul Doolan writes: Walter Benjamin took his own life at the age of 48. He wrote in his suicide note: ‘I am dying in a village where no one has ever heard of me.’ Had he survived and become an exile in New York, who knows? Perhaps the words ‘no one has ever heard of me’ would still ring true. Living might have proven to be a bad career move.
Kieran Fionn Murphy writes: Depictions of type 2 diabetes remain virtually absent from English-language novels, even though 589 million people worldwide have the disease. A mere mention of a character with type 2 diabetes who isn’t feckless, gluttonous, evil or dissolute, even as an aside, could help a vast, marginalised population feel recognised.
David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag, two aliens on a couch, telling each other and occasionally the nation to feck off.
Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’. It was many years later that I would learn the book’s significance.
John Simmons writes: Is Homer the most influential writer of all time? We don’t know much about whoever he, she or they might have been, and we don’t know with any certainty how old the Iliad and the Odyssey are. They brought us the power of storytelling, and for that we should give them the highest praise.
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment door.
Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection throws some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on the centre right and centre left.
Mike Gogan writes on Bloomsday: ‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’ This is one of quite a few yeses in the last paragraphs of ‘The Dead’, the final short story in ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce. In ‘Ulysses’, which was written after, the last word of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy faintly echoes this, ‘Yes’.