Lord Byron, exiled after a welter of scandals in England, found Venice a good place to pursue his normal interests of debauchery and adultery. But you can't hack that all the time without taking a rest.

It is quite well known that the supposed solidarity felt between the working classes of different nations melted away fairly quickly on the declaration of the First World War. So too, apparently, did English suffragettes' sympathy for the aspiration to Irish independence.

Our friends the Czechs want us to call their country by a different name. But as all citizens of Ireland, Eire, the Republic, the South and the Twenty-six Counties know, this is not always a simple matter.

The question of whether Britain should stay in the EU or leave will be settled as a purely transactional one: is it likely to be good for business or not? There is no point in appealing to a European vision for Britain has never had one.

The Hungarian writer and Nobel prizewinner Imre Kertész, who has died aged eighty-six, was deported to Auschwitz aged fourteen. Pondering on that experience, and more broadly on totalitarianism, was to provide him with the material for his life’s literary work.

The sentencing of Radovan Karadžic for crimes including ordering the Srebrenica massacre has been greeted as a cause of satisfaction. But what about all the other preceding massacres? When, asks Ed Vulliamy, will we see justice dispensed for them?

English Catholic writers like GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were very popular in Irish schools in the last century, Chesterton's prediction of the demise of Protestantism being particularly valued. But their entrenched antisemitism, or indeed any antisemitism, found very few takers in Ireland.

A conference to be held in Poland this autumn will consider the idea of solidarity, and by implication its current relative absence in Europe. Are there limits to how much solidarity can realistically be expected? Can we bring it back, or will 'national egotism' triumph?

Happy birthday to us as we enter our tenth year. The drb first appeared on St Patrick's Day 2007.

We mourn the death of Adrian Hardiman, a powerful intellect, an advocate of civil liberties and a contributor to the Dublin Review of Books.

Creative writers would seem to be well equipped to muse on certain lives they cannot have known. And why not the mysterious lives of their own parents, or that portion of those lives which occurred before the writing offspring were even born?

A squabble between servants in a Dublin house, which led to one of them being 'let go', ended up in court when the parlourmaid Rosa McCabe alleged that she had been fired after being wrongly accused of voicing pro-German sentiments.

The British intellectual review 'Encounter' shared a common source of funding with several European cousins and it was pleased to open its columns to their writers - as long as they didn't bang on about Europe.

There has been a justified focus on the recent rise of illiberal sentiments in central Europe, though the region is scarcely unique in harbouring xenophobic ideas. Yet these are countries with considerable intellectual potential and it is there surely that hope lies.

Social and political life, Pearse's St Enda's, the role of women and the part played by Dublin Protestants in the Rising are the subjects of four free lunchtime talks in Dublin in February and March.

The eminent Italian novelist, critic, journalist and philosopher of books and libraries has read his last. Though a preeminent man of books, he was rather relaxed about the fact that there were things he hadn't read.

Volunteer Gerald Keogh was shot dead outside Trinity College on Easter Tuesday 1916. He was one of three brothers involved in the Rising. Another brother, Augustus, was a noted theatre manager, who promoted the works of Shaw in Dublin.

Captain Jack White was a supporter of James Connolly and of his political creed of syndicalism. Was syndicalism just another type of socialism or was it something much more radical and revolutionary altoghether?

James Joyce, whose birthday we celebrate today, may not have been familiar with the term 'sexual harassment' but he knew the phenomenon. The most common victims in Edwardian Dublin were young women in service, preyed on my middle class men.

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century many people were beginning to take the measure of the parasitical landowning classes. None put it all quite so succinctly as Robert Burns, born on this day in 1759.