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

The variety contained in 2,000 lots at four days of auctions at Sheppards in Durrow, Co Laois next week is enormous.

Theatre director Breda Cashe says that when she first read the dramatised version of Mitch Albom’s memoir, Tuesdays with Morrie, she thought it “might be a little cheesy and sentimental”. But when the actors read the two-hander, the comedy emerged, even though it’s a true story about dying.

Family and friends of Deirdre Lynch made her funeral Mass into a heartwarming celebration of a girl described as “a wonderful, shining light”.

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.

IF a picture tells a thousand words, then one of John Minihan’s photos of his west Cork home would do instead of a sales brochure, or editorial write up.

Michael Gambon today pulled out of a new high-profile Alan Bennett play after being ordered to rest, but joked: “I’m temporarily not firing on all cylinders.”

A GREAT-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin has become the new Oxford Professor of Poetry following a contest tinged with controversy.

ALONG with much else, the Lisbon Treaty vote was surely an affirmation of the right of the individual to think and decide for him or herself whatever the intensity of the urgings from the institutions of State.

THE FAMILY of murder victim Siobhan Kearney made an impassioned plea yesterday for her killer to be caught.

THE first day might often be the worst in many things but Junior Certificate students were happy with the opening salvo of the exam season yesterday.