Previous Day
How Poles painted politics
A sad clown, a faun in a farmyard, sprites and nymphs - welcome to Polish Symbolism, a function of the nation's history of wars and foreign domination, writes Aidan Dunne p
Rocking against the grain
At 61, Neil Young continues to be the most unconventional of
icons - from reworking old songs to making an eco-friendly
documentary.
Burhan Wazir meets a true rock legend p
Inside the weird world of kids' showbiz
The tense nature of talent shows for children makes them perfect for comedy, Ben Miller, star of Razzle Dazzle, tells Michael Dwyer p
Arts
The blurring of the Blairs
Culture Shock: Recent novel 'The Ghost' adds to the litany of fiction about Tony Blair that has changed our sense of the real man, writes Fintan O'Toole pThe reel keeps on turning
On The Town: It was a case of old and new at this year's Corona Cork Film Festival opening party on Sunday night, with new sponsors Corona coming on board for the first time and many old friends of the festival turning up to enjoy the evening and lend support. pThe jury's out on the new Abbey
ArtScape: So, the next step towards the new Abbey was taken this week on a moist and unprepossessing morning, when Minister for Arts Séamus Brennan announced the selection jury for the international architectural competition for the new theatre at George's Dock, just past the Custom House. p
Keys to the city
Helping the capital's residents connect with the architectural fabric of their city is the chief purpose of this weekend's Open House Dublin, writes Rebecca Knowles . pProtecting the wildlife in the deep blue sea
Another Life: Until a few years ago, my mind-pictures of Ireland were all landbound, even though a good many looked out to the ocean from this or that cliff or sandy shore, writes Michael Viney . pHorizons
Public transport by the Lee How we can reduce our carbon footprint by designing sustainable transport systems for our towns and cities is the theme of a public meeting in the Ambassador Hotel, Cork City on Tuesday at 7.30pm. p
Thanks be for Mrs Simpson
History: In this book Roy Hattersley offers a dozen essays on the social and political landscape of Britain between the first and second World Wars. He covers a very wide range of issues - inevitably with more success in some cases than in others, writes Garret FitzGerald . pHibernia and human traffic
History: At the height of the War of Independence, W E B Du Bois declared that "no people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro", writes Daire Keogh . pStalked by their history
Fiction: We live in terrible times - but then, times have been terrible for quite a while now, almost forever in fact, writes Eileen Battersby . pScandalous beginnings A brilliant memoir details how a small sex scandal changed a young woman's life in 1950s Belfast
Memoir: This is ostensibly the story of a small scandal that happened to a young woman nearly 50 years ago in Rannafast in the Donegal Gaeltacht when, to quote Heaney, "the future was a verb in hibernation", writes Polly Devlin . pA clown who shouldn't be suffered gladly
Fiction: Peter Høeg shot to international success in the 1990s with his second novel, billed as a literary thriller, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. The novel was not a literary thriller in the traditional sense of combining poetical language with a suspenseful narrative - think Crime and Punishment, or The Name of the Rose - so much as the head of a literary novel stitched to the tail of a James Bond movie, writes Claire Kilroy . pEnright to sport new shorts soon
Loose Leaves: Inevitably all eyes will be on Anne Enright's post-Booker book, and we don't have long to wait. Taking Pictures will be published by Jonathan Cape in spring and the exciting thing is that it's a short story collection, another genre in which the novelist Enright excels, writes Caroline Walsh . pA primer on the art of the novel
Essays: John Butler Yeats once mused in a letter: '[I] If I had not been an unsuccessful & struggling man Willie & Jack would not have been so strenuous. [A] successful father is good for the daughters. For the sons it is another matter", writes Richard Tillinghast . pSuspicion under Stalin
History: As a child I had assumed that my mother was English. I learned later that she was born in the independent Baltic republic of Estonia. In Estonia's medieval capital of Tallinn - German Lutheran in detail, Tsarist in imagination - she led a tranquil childhood. But the threat of European war was mounting, writes Ian Thomson . pWhere global warming is claiming its first victims
Climate Change: A rainbow is a thing of delight. Colourful, bright, often accompanied by sunshine, it is a welcome sight in our latitudes. In Antarctica its appearance spells disaster, writes Dick Ahlstrom . p
Flirty food for thought
TV Review: It's been a chocolate-chip-and-chlamydia kind of week, with a silk-sheathed Nigella Lawson providing the corseted highs and lows. pScaling the food mountain
Radio Review: Butter mountains beside wine lakes, grain mountains towering over milk lakes - no one talks about them now (and not because we've scoffed the lot, which would be a grand theory to explain the obesity epidemic), but back in the 1970s they were all the go. p'Imagine sitting looking at Gráinne Seoige every day - now that's a job I wouldn't mind getting up early in the afternoon for'
Gráinne and Joe are visiting the old dear, because she wants to set herself up as a TV lifestyle expert - but it might be time to bring this wagon to a halt, writes Ross O'Carroll-Kelly . p
