In this decade of centenaries, it is important that the National Museum of Ireland mark the centenary of the Spanish Flu outbreak that swept Ireland during 1918 and 1919.

IN the shorthand of our time, an art form all but perfected by our American cousins, country music is described as “three chords and the truth”.

It’s almost 80 years since TS Eliot published his searing Four Quartets.

IF you’re expecting a rip-roaring ride through the wackily entertaining world of time travel films and TV shows, you could be in for a disappointment here. 

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THIS is a strange piece to write. It feels as though I’m about to intertwine both an ending and a beginning into one messy, emotional jumble. 

Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Paul Durcan were the poets examined in a higher-level Leaving Certificate English paper lasting over three hours.

April, according to TS Eliot, is the cruellest month stirring dull roots with spring rain.

Arvind Subramanian says the Greek people were deprived of true choices during the recent financial crisis

Jeremy Hutchinson is one of those people who changed the world they were born into. Dan Buckley on a sparkling career and a wonderful man still going strong at 100.

Georges Simenon (translated by David Coward)

Like Stalin, Putin has nurtured a climate of fear and lawlessness, in which those who rally behind the Kremlin feel a duty to eliminate the leader’s opponents however they can, says Nina L Khrushcheva

ONLY after reading this collection of memoirs, reviews and prose by the poet Wendy Cope (b. 1945), did I realise that she has become a ‘national treasure’ in the UK.

Richard Fitzpatrick reveals some books that are certain to cause a stir this spring.

THE route is all left turns, easily followed from the map. As we proceed north, and then west, we have views of the forested slopes of the Ballyhoura Range, Caroline Mountain, Knockduv, Carron and Seefin.

Last week, interim Garda commissioner Noirín O’Sullivan addressed the first intake of recruits in over five years, against a backdrop of controversy in the force. The following is an abridged version of her address

Billy Collins brings a brilliant eye to the most mundane events, writes Alan O’Riordan

Charlie Chaplin

TO paraphrase the well-worn phrase from the great poet, TS Eliot (who may well have stolen it from someone else), his advice to writers was: “Don’t plagiarise, steal.” We arrive at the end of our journey, and find the place we should have visited at the beginning.

The Professor Of Poetry

ONE of the longest-running shows in both West End and Broadway history, Cats will arrive at Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Aug 21.

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&.

Life Saving: Why We Need Poetry, Introductions to Great Poets

Edward Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917, but had long been suicidal and disillusioned with his writing, says Richard Fitzpatrick

EVERYONE knows you can get to work a little late on your last day.

Conor Horgan’s feature film debut doesn’t follow the usual script for an apocalyptic tale, writes Pádraic Killeen

Selected Poems and Translations of Ezra Pound 1908-1969

COMPLIMENTS of the season from festive Heathrow where the annual snow crisis has arrived a little earlier this year.

YOU can call off the search.

THE poet, Louis MacNeice died suddenly in 1963 of viral pneumonia, contracted while recording sound effects in an underground cave in Yorkshire for his last radio play, Persons from Porlock.

HEARTBREAK is a tiresome, frustrating book. Though marketed as a novel it fails to provide anything in the way of sustained narrative and is instead little more than an exasperating miscellany of thinly-sketched characters and random, disconnected vignettes.

THE poems of WB Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Adrienne Rich and TS Eliot were examined in the second higher level Leaving Certificate English paper.

THE book that launched a thousand Leaving Cert meltdowns is making a comeback.

Zadie Smith

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has called for Ted Hughes to be honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

“DO I dare to eat a peach?” J Alfred Prufrock, the sad anti-hero of TS Eliot’s eponymous love song asked himself in his old age. I recently dared to eat an Irish-grown peach in a Kinsale garden, and very fine and sweet it was, too, every bit as juicy as the peaches my brother grows in Spain.

WHILE these three slim volumes, from Jessie Lendennie’s publishing house by the Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare, are designed in the manner you expect from their publisher, the three poets also have in common a tendency toward “the tyranny of the one-page poem”.

The Bee Gees were honoured for their contribution to pop music with the unveiling of a special plaque in London today.

THE ENEMIES of Reason, a TV series by Richard Dawkins, is being shown by Channel 4.

Heather Mills McCartney was once again mocked at an awards ceremony today.

US Judge Leonie Brinkema sent Zacarias Moussaoui to prison for life today, to “die with a whimper,” for his role in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Twenty-three years ago Andrew Lloyd Webber composed a quirky musical inspired by TS Eliot’s collection of poem’s The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.