The fables, Seamus Heaney has written, that corpus of tales of innocent or treacherous beasts and birds, were once part of the common oral culture of Europe, a store of folk wisdom as pervasive and unifying at vernacular level as the doctrines of Christianity were in the higher realms of scholastic culture.
Men and women, we were told in school, have been engineered by God to be attracted to each other and thus ensure the continuance of the human race. But perhaps there is a design fault.
Saul Bellow judged that many people he knew had made too much of an investment in the difficult texts of Marxism to ever accept that it no longer had very much to say about reality. Can we say that about any later intellectual fashions?
Miss Fox, of Fleet Street near Charing Cross, though of uncertain family, unknown fortune and indifferent parts, was a young woman of very definite opinions, many of them other people’s.
Some clients of Amazon are a little aggrieved at the company’s business practices. The company says it only wants to sell all its books for nothing, make everyone happy and set all the horses free.
Modernising influences in Turkey tried to impose a purely Turkic language with a new alphabet in place of the rich mixture of Turkic, Arabic and Persian which had comprised the language of the Ottoman empire. This led to a few problems.
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.