OVER the years, there have been many odes to the city that never sleeps.

August: Osage County ****

Michael Hilliard Mulcahy’s play, Beyond the Brooklyn Sky, deals with the generation that emigrated from Ireland in the 1980s and returned, some without having fulfilled their dreams.

Vivien Leigh’s archive — including letters sent to husband Laurence Olivier and diaries written until just before the Gone With The Wind star’s death — have been acquired by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum&.

IT’S been a rare Irish summer of glorious sunshine and so the Gate Theatre’s new production of A Streetcar Named Desire couldn’t arrive at a more apt time.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Richard Fitzpatrick rounds up his top tomes of the year

Celebrated author, playwright and commentator Gore Vidal has died at the age of 86, his nephew said today.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families

WHILE the Oscars is an overblown act of worship of Hollywood by Hollywood, where the stars and directors are perceived as gods, the Cannes Film Festival is a bit more European.

THE idea that drugs and alcohol can fuel creativity is a myth, it was claimed yesterday.

Actor Corin Redgrave has died at the age of 70, his family said today.

New York City officials have ordered the owners of Bob Dylan's former home at the famed Chelsea Hotel to stop their renovations following a flurry of complaints by fans insisting they were destroying the property

MONDAY evening and it was off to an amateur production of The Glass Menagerie; strangely appropriate it seemed too in current circumstances.

WHILE waiting to move into our long-term rented house in the Alpujarras mountains, south of Granada, we left Spain and went to Africa, arriving at midnight in Tangiers with no arrangements made.

LAST week we happened to mention an old hero, one Gore Vidal — essayist, novelist, screenwriter, former homeowner in west Cork — and used one of his many bons mots in this very space.

Christian Slater's anticipated Broadway appearance has been delayed by a week, to allow the actor more time in front of an audience.

HOLLYWOOD rolled out its big guns at the Venice International Film Festival yesterday as John Travolta and Denzel Washington showed off their latest movies.

British actress Natasha Richardson will portray Tennessee Williams’s fragile, faded Southern beauty Blanche du Bois in a Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, opening next spring.

Actress Ashley Judd is recovering from a sprained ankle – following an accident during a performance of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof.

The veteran actor Ned Beatty has given his outspoken opinions about the talents of his co-stars in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Neighbours may not be the most cerebral of shows on TV but it does occasionally stretch itself intellectually.