Latest Blogs
The First World War – Who Done It?
Germany, like Britain, is seeing the publication of a slew of books on the hundredth anniversary of the Great War.
Blessing of the Animals, 1787
Goethe, visiting Rome, stumbled upon Neddy, Bluebell and Dobbin receiving the blessings of the Lord. It made his day.
Morrissey wins TS Eliot prize
Co Armagh-born Sinead Morrissey is the winner of the prestigious British poetry prize, following in the footsteps of Heaney, Muldoon, Carson and Longley.
Disappearing Librarians
There are 100,000 fewer librarians in the United States than there were twenty years ago. And in Ireland we are planning to open libraries with no staff. Oh brave new world!
La France en colère
Newsweek is not letting those cheese-eating surrender monkeys off the hook.
Words from the Departed
Some notable writers left us in the course of 2013. The Guardian remembers some of them through quotations from their remarks about their work or writing, or politics.
Time Please
Which is more important? Knowing something first or knowing it correctly? And is it possible that the frenetic pursuit of the first might make the second increasingly unlikely?
Get thee behind me
For centuries he had found work for idle hands, and his picture book was becoming increasingly popular. Then, at the end of the seventeenth century, some people started saying he didn’t exist.
Cuisine versus Cucina
The French can be very high and mighty about their slow-cooked tripe in the manner of Caen, but there’s more to Italian cooking than red sauce, Elizabeth David insisted.
Oh my God, not a recovery please
If we are indeed very slowly, very hesitatingly, and with no guarantees, coming out of the worst of our economic depression, everyone will be very happy – except the intellectuals.
Themmens get everything
A wide river can separate people on either bank. It has also been known, from time to time, to keep them safe.
A Gulf not a Channel
The English do not understand the French, or at any rate didn’t until the master thinkers of structuralism and poststructuralism began to invade their universities.