She calls it the beauty of ageing (or not caring what anyone else thinks) – midway through her 40s, Annmarie O’Connor finally feels at ease with herself and her style, so much so she’s just signed a modelling contract. Welcome to the new ‘middle age’.

Katie Roiphe is a well-known essayist often appearing in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and other literary journals. 

Quote of the week: “I understand that they feel like that is their body. I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host’.”

Mixing fact with fiction, a novel about James Joyce and his daughter Lucia claims that they had an incestuous relationship. This is not just nonsense, says Frank MacGabhann, but literary child abuse.

Des O’Sullivan says sale includes superb collection of Irish 18th century furniture and international art.    

3/5

US: An aspiring nun who was told she couldn’t enter a convent until her student loan debt was paid off has used an online appeal to get the money.

LATE last month, Kate Middleton, took on a new role as editor of The Huffington Post UK for the day.

Bernardine Coverley, daughter of Irish parents who ran a pub in Brixton, met the painter, Lucian Freud when she was 16 and he was 20 years her senior.

David Bowie’s Major Tom is an average geezer who loves his wife, a fragile human being in the hands of commercial forces he doesn’t understand, writes Victoria White

It’s okay for a boy to obsess over the Premiership. But the same rules don’t apply to teen girls, says Young Adult Writer of the Year Louise O’Neill. 

Hanif Kureishi, the English novelist and playwright of Pakistani extraction, is best known for acclaimed work like My Beautiful Laundrette, Intimacy and ‘The Buddha of Suburbia, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1990. Frequently ambitious in terms of subject matter and exploring the boundaries of genre, new work by him is always eagerly anticipated.

Marquis De Sade wrote all his best work from his asylum cell. I really must try it sometime, especially since I might not have any choice with this team.

Cinema and magazines would have us think everyone is having more and better sex than us. So what do we know about people’s sex lives? Suzanne Harrington looks through the keyhole.

What is it really like to be part of Generation Y? Author Louise O’Neill on why anxiety has become the new ‘normal’ for twenty-somethings.

Everyman, Cork

When Douglas Kennedy’s half-drunk father called him “a loser” he emptied his bank account and returned to Ireland where he had studied at Trinity. He’s been more or less travelling since. He explains all to Declan Burke. 

EXCEPTIONAL EXHIBITS

Forgetting is an odd thing: Everyone does it, but by definition cannot discuss it in much detail. Dutch psychologist and ‘memory scholar’ Draaisma makes a game attempt to explore this paradox from numerous viewpoints.

Edited by Otto Penzler

Considered one of the most talented, sought-after and striking actresses of her time, Suzanne Harrington finds the Anjelica Huston in her autobiography without ego

Your perfume has much to contend with this time of year, with damp wool and lashings of anti-frizz/root-boosting spray leading the charge.

British welfare reform minister Lord Freud has issued a "full and unreserved apology" after suggesting that some disabled people were "not worth" the minimum wage, but stopped short of resigning.

By Esther Freud

Ben Ambridge

A Silver Cross pram made double its guide, says Des O’Sullivan.

Rose Mary Roche looks at why we own so many pairs, covet more — and don’t even wear half of those we own.

Alchemy and transformation lie at the heart of Gavin Hogg’s work, writes Orlagh Ní Arrachtáin.

Emma Donoghue

HE was a neat, quietly-spoken, witty, smallish man of Irish extraction who was liked wherever he went, in New York during the Roaring 20s. Not that he went that many places.

Francis Bacon made art market history in New York this week when his Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for $142,405,000 at Christie's in New York to become the most valuable painting ever sold at auction.

On the surface, the former basketball player Dennis Rodman seems easy to grasp.

The Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin is to exhibit material relating to the auction-smashing triptych of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon.

A Francis Bacon portrait of his friend and fellow painter Lucian Freud has become the most valuable work of art ever sold at auction — fetching over $142m (€105.5m) in just six minutes of frantic bidding.

A Francis Bacon painting of his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud has become the most valuable work of art ever sold at auction – fetching over €100m.

YOU know the expression all mouth and trousers? According to the Harvard Business Review, this term may now be applied with scientific accuracy to quite a few men.

Francis Bacon’s Three Lives of Lucian Freud is set to break his own record of $86 million, Des O’Sullivan reports.

DOES our law understand the bond between a mother and her infant? I wondered about this when the High Court defended the right of the HSE to take a day-old baby away from his mother to “protect” him last week.