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.
James Moran offers his thoughts on the new Library of Birmingham, which opened earlier this month and which puts books and literary culture at the heart of England.
Franz Kafka died in an Austrian sanatorium from an incurable illness, aged forty, in 1924. Nothing could be done for him. There were some far more questionable deaths just up the road from there almost twenty years later.
Barra O Seaghdha considers just how easy it might have been at several steps along his ascending career path for Seamus Heaney to turn away from the past.
Rita Thalmann, an historian born in Nuremberg who taught and published in France, was one of the last historians of Nazism to have personal experience of it in the disasters it brought on her family.
It is perhaps the greatest of understatements to say that Ulster loyalism gets a bad press. But some people are working to help foster an articulacy in the community that might end up being beneficial to everyone.
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’.