Britain's most valuable poetry prize, funded by the estate of TS Eliot, has gone to David Harsent for his collection Fire Songs.

The American novelist Kent Haruf, whose novels were set in small town Colorado, died late last year. 'I don't feel like death is right round the corner. But if it is, it's a bigger corner than I thought it was.'”

Having no intimates, and no one to whom she could confide her feelings, Frances Burney addressed them confidently to Nobody.

Whatever we have done, or whatever we have failed to do, may pursue us through restless nights for many decades after our conscious minds have forgotten it all.

The great romantic poet found the Adriatic city to be a place where he could indulge both his spiritual and intellectual longings and his more carnal ones.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was considered the most promising African American writer at the turn of the twentieth century. A musical for which he wrote the lyrics was performed in Dublin 110 years ago.

German novelist Siegfried Lenz, who has died aged 88, was a political collaborator of Günter Grass and a champion of reconciliation between Germany and the countries it had devastated in the Second World War.

You put your right leg in, your right leg out. In, out, in, out. You shake it all about. You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around. That's what it's all about.

Gilbert White, an 18th century country parson and naturalist, wrote in sumptuous detail of the animal and bird life he observed around him. Here he is on the varieties of birdsong.

With his fortieth birthday the realisation came to Philip Larkin that he had done nothing with the `fat fillet-steak' part of life.

László Krasnahorkai talks to George Szirtes about how he writes and what he reads.

Why did the soldiers join up and go to be slaughtered in France, Belgium or Gallipoli? Sometimes because the misery of their lives made them think that anything would be better.

An episode from the early 1880s shows a young Augusta Gregory sympathising with an oppressed people and its revolutionary leaders - far from Ireland.

John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet who died 150 years ago, is not getting the commemoration he deserves in Britain.

Penguin books has embarked on a programme to republish all 75 of George Simenon's Maigret novels. Will the phlegmatic Parisian policeman captivate a new generation?

In May 2004 ten new members, including eight from central and eastern Europe, joined the European Union. Have the effects of this major expansion on the union's capacity to define what it is been entirely positive?

Some people think you can say anything you like about priests. While others don't. In the fourteenth century, if Chaucer was anything to go by, there wasn't much you couldn't say.

Those condemned to spend their lives under grey northern skies can understandably harbour deep longings for the Mediterranean. But there is little reason to think Europe's current headaches will be cured just by knocking back a few beakers full of the warm south.

A hundred years ago Joyce's Portrait first appeared in the magazine The Egoist.

Michel de Montaigne set out from France in the summer of 1580 on a long journey which was to take him through Switzerland, Germany and Austria, over the Alps and into Italy. Many things interested him in the life of the Rome of Gregory XIII, but he was struck by how little of the ancient city remained.