Politics at the start of 1916 in Cork City and county was overshadowed by events in Europe and the Middle East.

Madeleine D’Arcy’s first short story won an award. Her first collection may too says Colette Sheridan.

A Delicate Wildness: The Life and Loves of David Thomson 1914-1988

YOU could nearly say that Dripsey Castle has only changed hands three times in over 500 years. There have been changes of name and co-joined dynasties, yes, but the property which began with a castle and finished with an apartment has been owned by just three families.

Patrick Cooney spent a decade “dropping in and out” of the lives of four members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy for his documentary, The Raj in the Rain, which will be screened on Sunday during the Kinsale Arts Festival.

Blind Man’s Bluff

Suzanne Joinson

Elizabeth Bowen’s Selected Irish Writings. Edited by Eibhear Walshe, Cork University Press, €39.

A €10 MILLION plan to turn a stately mansion and its extensive grounds into a major tourist attraction rivalling the Rock of Cashel and Muckross House is to be discussed next month by Fáilte Ireland and the Office of Public Works (OPW).

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story

I AM not surprised that Jack Lane (Letters, October 8) is impervious to new evidence that his vendetta against the memory of Elizabeth Bowen is ill-founded.

MARTIN MANSERGH (Letters, September 26) relies on (unquoted) help from Prof Brian Girvin in his efforts to prove that Elizabeth Bowen’s activities in Ireland during World War II were other than those of a patriotic British spy.

DR MARTIN MANSERGH TD refers to a private communication from Brian Girvin as proof that Elizabeth Bowen’s secret reports to the British government about Ireland during the war were not spy reports (Letters, September 26).

I THINK it is not very becoming for an acclaimed legislator, Dr Martin Mansergh TD, to be so gratuitously rude to another correspondent, Jack Lane who put his case on Elizabeth Bowen’s reports on World War II in a very scholarly and objective manner (Letters, September 17).

Notwithstanding the offensive campaign over many years by Jack Lane to blacken the memory of Elizabeth Bowen, the holding of a Trevor/Bowen weekend in Mitchelstown and the annual service at Farahy show that many people in north Cork appreciate the area’s association with a famous writer.

I CAN assure Martin Mansergh (Letters, Sept 9) that I have neither the inclination nor the power to excommunicate Elizabeth Bowen or anybody else from anything they might wish to be.

JACK LANE (Letters, August 20 and September 5) might desist from his continuing efforts to denigrate the memory of the writer Elizabeth Bowen, who is buried in Farahy Church, near Kildorrery in north Cork, of which I am a trustee (my family and hers are related by marriage). He has two grievances in particular against her: one, that she spied against Ireland, betraying Ireland’s interests/secrets to the British in WWII, and, second, on the basis of a fleeting, frustrated remark, that she hated Ireland.

KATHLEEN FITZGIBBON (Letters, August 29) says, “Miss [Elizabeth] Bowen and de Valera, whatever their differences, were both aware that the common enemy [in WWII] was fascism”.

THE letter from Jack Lane on the Trevor/Bowen Summer School in Mitchelstown and Farrihy, Kildorrery, Co Cork (August 20) gave an interesting side-view on a great Irish writer.

YOUR report on the inaugural Trevor/Bowen Summer School in Mitchelstown (County, August 14) says “the audience was thrilled to hear the voice of Elizabeth Bowen” from a recording that was part of Donnacha O’Dulaing’s lecture on the writer.

A MAJOR collection of work by sculptor Seamus Murphy was unveiled yesterday by the country’s newest national cultural institution.

CONTROVERSIAL plans for Ireland’s first bio-diesel ‘green fuel’ production factory have been withdrawn.