The old Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed into its component parts after the First World War, a victim of rising nationalism and Woodrow Wilson’s backing for national self-determination. Given the wave of fascism and authoritarianism that followed, leading to another war, many people thought something very valuable had been lost.
Is the future of the book made from paper to be appreciated largely as a beautiful object, not necessarily destined to die out but to become a remote, old-fashioned, cultured cousin while more and more production is transferred to electronic format?
A new play performed by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, features a superb portrayal of Lyndon Baines Johnson by Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston.
Rebecca Solnit remembers a time when the paper was delivered in the morning, you went to the pictures to see a film and Mom always had something good cooking in the kitchen.
Democracy and debate are all very well – in their place. But sometimes we should surely just listen to the advice of people who know more about these things than we do.
Some people thought the guys in the group, and particularly the drummer, had no rights at all and should play what, and wherever, and for as long as they were told. But Joseph Haydn rapped his bow and stood up to them.
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.