2013 - From film to visual art, from theatre to pop, our critics pick their highlights of the year in arts

MY friend Mike Dwyer recalls meeting the late Séamus Heaney and the playwright Brian Friel at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts.

It must have been in 1990 or ’91, as all were present for the launch of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. The college houses an impressive Shovel Museum, to which the three Irishmen were irresistibly drawn. Heaney took down the shovel that most resembled those he had handled as a youth at Mossbawn — the family farm in Co Derry — and struck it on the floor, exclaiming, “Hear it sing!”

Heaney’s passing in August was an immeasurable loss to our culture. His verse was loved the world over, from Oxford, where he served as Professor of Poetry, to Harvard, where he was Poet in Residence, to Stockholm, where, in 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.