Kathy Scott is a founder of arts production organisation, The Trailblazery. She is also the curator of the Wonderlust stage at the Body&Soul festival, taking place at Ballinlough Castle, Co Westmeath, June 17-19. This year’s Wonderlust lineup includes a public conversation with drum and bass pioneer Goldie.

The Handbook of the Irish Revival contains violent material and covers a period when theatre was never so exciting because history itself was excited, writes Thomas McCarthy.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the repatriation of Roger Casement’s remains, writer Ryle Dwyer (Irish Examiner, February 23) called the ‘Black Diaries’ controversy “an irrelevant distraction over the greater part of a century”.

In his latest book, “Vivid Faces The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923”, Professor Roy Foster of Oxford again seeks to condemn Major John McBride’s role vis a vis the divorce case with his wife Maud Gonne.

R.F. Foster

MY advice to aspiring writers is to finish everything you start.

THE hope expressed by the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, that next weekend’s Eucharistic Congress will begin a process of healing for a deeply divided Irish Catholic Church is likely to prove a vain one.

In no particular order or weight ... Paul Brady, Henry Shefflin, Myrtle Allen, Saoirse Ronan, the Gulf Stream’s micro climate, Seamus Heaney, Fiona Shaw, Martin Hayes, Graham Norton, the Society of St Vincent de Paul, Rory McIlroy, Olivia O’Leary, Connemara, the Delphi and Blackwater valleys, Julie Feeney, John Hume, Lyric FM, Michael Noonan’s unflinching, selfless resolve at a moment of great personal tragedy.

New biography of James Joyce shows he was ready to sacrifice everything for his art, down to the last supportive woman, writes Thomas McCarthy

Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, RF Foster, Oxford University Press, €22.95

GERARD HOGAN, in his extended foreword to Dermot Keogh’s and Andrew McCarthy’s book, The Making of the Irish Constitution 1937, wonders if it is asking too much to give Eamon de Valera some credit where credit is due?

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.

The legacy of the 1916 Easter Rising will be discussed today at the Parnell Summer School in Co Wicklow.

Politicians and academics gather in Co Wicklow today for the annual five-day Parnell Summer School.

THE views of an Oxford University professor and a county manager have been ignored by Kerry councillors, who have agreed to rezone historic demesne lands for residential purposes.

THE views of an Oxford University professor and the county manager have been ignored by Kerry councillors, who have agreed to rezone historic demesne lands for residential purposes.

NUI Galway today conferred honorary degrees on four academics for their work on human rights and Irish humanitarian studies.

IT may only have been an honorary degree but it was even better than the real thing as far as Bono was concerned.