Blog Articles

A little bit of Under Milk Wood for St David's Day. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard rehearses her two late husbands.

A detailed study of Moscow in the year that Stalin's purges got into full swing is, writes one reviewer, an almost impossibly rich masterpiece.

Evelyn Waugh writes to his friend Dorothy Lygon about his wartime adventures and work on what was to become Brideshead Revisited.

American novelist and short story writer Cynthia Ozick claims to find an ineradicable anti-Semitism at work in Europe. But her definition of the phenomenon may not be the same as yours or mine.

Fifty years ago four New York friends met for dinner and came up with a project which was to leave a lasting mark on American intellectual life.

There are two ways of looking at it: bookshops are about atmosphere, character, associations, romance; or they are about books. If we go for the former we soon won’t have any bookshops.

A dispute between France and Luxembourg and the European Commission seems to have implications for the question of whether individual European companies will be able to thrive in the electronic book market or if it will be a case of (American) winner takes all.

If Johann Gutenberg’s first money-making wheeze had gone just a little differently he might not have bothered inventing printing.

Why do novelists write novels about novelists? Maylis Besserie presents the thoughts of an elderly gentleman from another generation, someone removed from her by era, gender and nationality, and thus asserts, in defiance of current orthodoxy, the independence of artistic creation.

Although Mahon was the last poet one would accuse of naivety, he was attracted to an ideal of simplicity, writes Magdalena Kay. This correlates with a tacit conviction that feelings of insignificance can bring on ecstasy: ‘Such tiny houses, such enormous skies!’

Derek’s was a life characterised by a certain turbulence, dedication to his craft, a disputatious impulse and an inner reserve sometimes bordering on the stand-offish. But when the mood took him he was uproarious company.

Brian Friel, in ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’, refers to the sudden disappearance from their Donegal home in the 1930s of two of his aunts, Rose and Agnes. The play is not wholly autobiographical, but the true story of what happened to these women is deeply sad but perhaps not so unusual.