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.

Fingers are being pointed at Hungary and Poland, accusing them of turning their back on European values and breeding an ugly xenophobia and populism. There may be some truth in this, but are they the only places where extreme political forces are thriving?

A painful case of 1926, which came to the attention of the Dublin courts, seemed to illustrate the wide gap between Irish middle class morality and the easier and more indulgent ways of the French bourgeoisie.

Journalists, according to Frederic Raphael, are the short order chefs of the writing world. With the great Joseph Roth you got more than wedges and coleslaw.

When icicles hang by the wall and you stop by woods on a snowy evening, it's time for a list of the best poetic celebrations of winter.

January 6th: a day to eat king cakes, for women to sit back and put their feet up - sometimes - and for well-meaning men to get their comeuppance

Like Floyd Mayweather Junior in boxing, Costa poetry winner Don Paterson is not just technically immaculate; he hurts, hitting hard and gifted with a true fighter's armoury of punches.

Mary Pendarves was a well-connected socialite who was flattered to win the friendship of Dean Swift. Many years after her release from an unhappy marriage she married again, this time happily, to Dr Patrick Delany and the two set up home in a beautiful house on the banks of the Tolka.

In the German rental model there are considerable advantages for those renting, primarily security of tenure and protection against arbitrary increases. There are long-term advantages for landlords too. But principally housing is regarded as a social asset, which ensures citizens are housed.

I was like 'rules matter, clarity matters' and this like 70-year-old professor of linguistics was like 'keep your hair on, you're so uptight, it's about expressing yourself''. Jeez!

Nancy Mitford was one of the famous Mitfords. Her sister Unity fell in love with Hitler and shot herself when war broke out. Nancy's sparkling and mildly satirical novels of class have been reissued by Penguin with new covers that can only be described as spiffing.

Mary Granville, later Mary Pendarves and Mary Delany, was bullied into marriage with an older man aged seventeen for financial reasons: 'I was married with great pomp. Never was woe drest out in gayer colours ...

There are many reasons to change one's name: to keep a step ahead of the law, to be accepted in a different or superior social circle, or, just conceivably, to dump the last politically determined change and return a little closer to one's origins.

A new anthology of the writings of the Irish Revival demonstrates that literature is written in a context. But if the ludicrous decision to downgrade the teaching of history in secondary schools is not reversed, similar volumes in the future will be incomprehensible.

In July 1941 more than 340 Jews were beaten, humiliated and then murdered in Jedwabne in Poland by a large group of local men. Shortly afterwards the wife of one of the killers turned up to Mass wearing a fur coat that had only recently been worn to a synagogue.

The former German chancellor, who died today, was one of the major figures of the European centre left in the twentieth century. Though this centre-leftism was a different thing from Blairism, Schmidt was a tough and practical man. People who have visions should see the doctor, he thought.