I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Writers And Artists

SPLITTING THE VOTE

Young Nathan Zuckerman is preaching to his father about politics, but his father has some lessons too about what the Republican party is for.

SEEING BRIGHT PICTURES

Charlotte Brontë receives some well meant advice from a more senior literary figure, which however she finds a little confusing.

OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES

Being a writer can be and has been combined with many other activities, manufacturing paint and varnish for example.

QUIXOTE IN WICKLOW

When exactly was it that Protestant ascendancy began to decay in Ireland? In WB Yeats’s eloquent speech in the Irish senate in 1925 on...

CHEKHOV’S HAMMER

“Behind the door of every happy, satisfied person,” wrote Chekhov in the story “Gooseberries”, “there ought to stand a man with a hammer whose...

MESSING ABOUT WITH RHYME

There was an old man of San Remo Whose verses were sometimes quite lameo. While his middle lines rhymed As their syllables chimed His first and his fifth...

MIŁOSZ IN HEAVEN

Cynthia L Haven wrote in a recent Times Literary Supplement essay (November 23rd) about the wave of commemorations and celebrations that attended the hundredth anniversary this...

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