Prof Thomas Docherty, a leading critic of the managerialist threat to the traditional idea and role of the university, is to give a talk at Maynooth University on March 25th.
Germany’s second biggest book fair, at Leipzig, is oriented towards the reading public rather than the trade. Over the last week it attracted 186,000 visitors, a record.
What is the purpose of ‘jargon’? Is it simply to bamboozle us and disguise the nature, or absence, of the message? Or do difficult concepts sometimes need difficult words? A bit of both perhaps.
In the editing game there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get everything in your text just so – as long as you’ve got unlimited time and an endless supply of well-trained staff. But in the real world nine out of ten sometimes ain’t bad.
Can the observant Muslim take alcohol? The most common answer would be no, yet the ninth century Abassid caliphs so much admired by ISIS couldn’t leave the stuff alone.
England in the late 1960s was full of temptations, what with barmaids, divorcees and lingerie ads in the London Underground. It was the kind of place where anything might happen, though it didn’t.
It is not difficult to find statistics to back up the view that our parliamentary democracies are not very democratic. But is there any evidence that we would wish to make the effort to invent any other kind?
Playwright Sir David Hare wonders why British Labour’s leader doesn’t speak out eloquently in favour of socialism and denounce the whole rotten edifice of British capitalism. Perhaps because he doesn’t want his party to lose most of its seats.
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’.
Raymond Geuss writes: Marx is generally considered to be a thinker who had little time for the spiritual dimension of human life. This is correct if the spiritual life is understood as depending on reference to theological or transhuman entities or to metaphysical properties.
Liam Kennedy writes: Sociologists, unlike historians, have long memories. My evidence for this – historians like evidence – is a sample of one, the former president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.