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.

Bruce Clunies-Ross remembers a festive meeting of the poet, a Danish expert on sheela-na-gigs and PV Glob, the royal antiquary who wrote of Tollund Man, the natural warmth of the gathering further enhanced by glasses of a Danish spirit flavoured with bog myrtle and a variety of Tuborg made specially for the Danish court.

Handsome men are a dime a dozen, believe me. And what are they going to do? Sit on you, that's what they'll do. But Raymond Chandler, oh Raymond, Raymond. There was a guy who knew how to treat furniture.

Goethe, visiting Rome, stumbled upon Neddy, Bluebell and Dobbin receiving the blessings of the Lord. It made his day.

Co Armagh-born Sinead Morrissey is the winner of the prestigious British poetry prize, following in the footsteps of Heaney, Muldoon, Carson and Longley.

Some notable writers left us in the course of 2013. The Guardian remembers some of them through quotations from their remarks about their work or writing, or politics.

For centuries he had found work for idle hands, and his picture book was becoming increasingly popular. Then, at the end of the seventeenth century, some people started saying he didn't exist.

The French can be very high and mighty about their slow-cooked tripe in the manner of Caen, but there's more to Italian cooking than red sauce, Elizabeth David insisted.

The English do not understand the French, or at any rate didn't until the master thinkers of structuralism and poststructuralism began to invade their universities.