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.
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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!
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The great French socialist leader Leon Blum was much hated by the extreme right in the 1930s, and largely because he was Jewish. It should also however be remembered that he was much hated by the extreme left.
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A poem from Moya Cannon's latest collection makes connections between medieval Dublin, a querulous student and south Dublin's most pleasant amenity.
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In 1603, William Shakespeare was, among other things, an English dramatist. With the accession of James Stuart of Scotland to the English throne he was to have to learn to become a British one.
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St Crispin's Day, the day on which the Battle of Agincourt was fought six hundred years ago, was a glorious one for England. Its memory was called upon at another difficult time in the mid-twentieth century, but the Agincourt battle scenes in Laurence Olivier's 'Henry V' were in fact filmed in Ireland.
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Ireland in the early 1890s was a country in paralysis, but over the next thirty years it began to move again as ideas bubbled up and were debated in new journals, clubs and societies. A new anthology catches the cultural ferment of that era.
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George Frederick Handel's sublime `Messiah', first performed in Dublin in 1742, was not entirely about giving the bourgeoise a nice outing. Its purpose was to raise funds to relieve distress, which then, even more than now, was prevalent in Dublin.
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The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written a sharp analysis of the moral world of Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility', though her theories on its anonymous publication may tell us more about Ferrante's motives than Austen's.
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According to some British commentators, it doesn't hugely matter whether Britain is formally in or out of Europe. In reality it will always be half-in, and that suits it, and its financial sector in particular, just fine.
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Exiled to the remote south by Mussolini's fascist regime, painter, writer and medical doctor Carlo Levi found there a peasant society that had apparently remained untouched by civilisation or modernity.
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A new novel by Kevin Stevens tells of the frustrations and confusions of adolescence, the precarious position of immigrants in an indifferent or hostile host society and the consolations of friendship, love and music.
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Artists and painters have long been fascinated by the weather and have not ceased to be so even in an era where mystery and religious speculation have largely moved over for science. Our tendency to worship nature suggests a question: is God the thing we see when we look up?
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Many Irish over the centuries sought refuge in Liverpool, and once they arrived there didn’t go far, settling in Vauxhall near the docks or on Scotland Road. The local MP, TP O’Connor, represented Liverpool Scotland as an Irish nationalist from 1885 until his death in 1929.
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