Latest Blogs
Byron in Venice
The great romantic poet found the Adriatic city to be a place where he could indulge both his spiritual and intellectual longings and his more carnal ones.
Wandering Jews
The late historian Tony Judt rose from a poor London Jewish background to become a world-renowned scholar and political thinker. Would he have achieved the same had he been born in Ireland, where his father shipped up in the 1930s?
It’s the real thing
Colm Toibin’s new novel, Nora Webster, has been garnering some very high praise from the critics.
Speaka Da Eengleesh
Why is it that so much ‘excellence’ is to be found in the university sector in the English-speaking world, and so little elsewhere?
A Pot of Gold
Paul Laurence Dunbar was considered the most promising African American writer at the turn of the twentieth century. A musical for which he wrote the lyrics was performed in Dublin 110 years ago.
Siegfried Lenz: 1926-2014
German novelist Siegfried Lenz, who has died aged 88, was a political collaborator of Günter Grass and a champion of reconciliation between Germany and the countries it had devastated in the Second World War.
It’s Poetry: Read it Out Loud
A new anthology of poetry for young people with links to through smartphone or tablet to recordings will make the best Christmas present – evvah.
Love as a principle, order as its base
In advance of the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, Tom Hennigan reflects on the significance of the country’s unusual ‘retro-futurist’ national flag and in particular of its famous motto celebrating order and progress.
The thickness of books
Books are a different class of object, argues Toby Munday, profoundly unlike magazines, newspapers, blogs, games or social media sites. They will be damaged if they are treated as if they are the same.
Are you dancin’? Are you askin’?
You put your right leg in, your right leg out. In, out, in, out. You shake it all about. You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around. That’s what it’s all about.
Look at the birds of the air
Gilbert White, an 18th century country parson and naturalist, wrote in sumptuous detail of the animal and bird life he observed around him. Here he is on the varieties of birdsong.
The Literary Racket
Edgar Allan Poe was resolutely unimpressed by the modus operandi of the press, and in particular those sections of it in which literary opinions were offered and books reviewed.