Those condemned to spend their lives under grey northern skies can understandably harbour deep longings for the Mediterranean. But there is little reason to think Europe’s current headaches will be cured just by knocking back a few beakers full of the warm south.
New Labour and others enthusiastically embraced a model of society which relegated many people to the margins while embracing and celebrating the buccaneer virtues. We have seen where that got us. Is it too late for the left to think again?
First of all you knew you were going to one place or the other. Then along came purgatory. Why it was required is a complex matter, but for heavy work under ground they knew they were going to need the Irish.
Adam Thirlwell wishes us to contemplate the writer as great soul, cast out of bourgeois society for his compulsion for truth-telling. But the examples he chooses seem a little strange.
The Greeks have been asked to liberalise book prices, a move which publishing and cultural interests in both Germany and France see as inimical to the long-term health of the book sector.
Doing good is all very well, but best to keep it to one’s self. Being good is a more slippery matter still, and the good man often shares a bed with the bad one.
Classical and medieval thinkers had a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with the practices of merchants, shopkeepers and stallholders. ‘Five obols, guv, and I’ll throw in the amphora. Can’t say fairer than that.’
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’.