Handsome men are a dime a dozen, believe me. And what are they going to do? Sit on you, that’s what they’ll do. But Raymond Chandler, oh Raymond, Raymond. There was a guy who knew how to treat furniture.
Co Armagh-born Sinead Morrissey is the winner of the prestigious British poetry prize, following in the footsteps of Heaney, Muldoon, Carson and Longley.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.