Less than a month after the untimely death of popular LGBT rights advocate Dave Roche, his partner Paul O’Shea gives an insight into the love they shared

It’s a thankless task, editing a poetry anthology — by their very nature they attract criticism for who makes the final cut and who doesn’t. 

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence”.

 

The Hobbit star Richard Armitage is in Hannibal season 3 as the killer from the original books - with a familiar tattoo

Here is the thread of the game. As Waterford supporters streamed onto the turf in Semple Stadium yesterday after a comprehensive victory in the NHL final, a trim gent in his thirties threw his arms around a player in white and blue.

Peter Ackroyd is one of the most productive and elegant biographers writing in English today but is often accused of not uncovering anything new about his subjects. That doesn’t matter, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea

Cork’s choral festival again promises to be one of the highlights of the cultural calendar, says Jo Kerrigan

Dan MacCarthy is roughing it on a jeep safari in rugged Bandhavgarh National Park in northern India, where he hopes to get a glimpse of an elusive tiger or, maybe, two.

19th century artist Samuel Palmer’s entire prints form a new show, Visible Poetry, says Orlagh Ní Arrachtáin.

David Park

THE Nepalese boy looks shocked but he has a very big ice-cream.

In the words of William Blake, in the early 19th century: “Man brings all that he has or can have into the world with him. Man is born like a garden, ready planted and sown”.

Higher Gossip

I’ve no problem admitting it.

Van Morrison is dismissive of fame, but his music will endure despite his aloofness, says John Minihan

THE Stray Sod Country is a metaphor, a fable which the characters of Patrick McCabe’s new novel continually fall back on. It describes being lost in what were once reassuring surroundings, being intimidated or deceived by the very things that used to make you feel secure. It is a way of explaining things, “frightening emotions, things like depression or extreme loneliness”.

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

Red-hot favourite Racy won the opening EBF Poppin Lane Maiden Stakes at Pontefract today under a hands-and-heels ride by champion jockey Ryan Moore.

SHINING, crystallised flurries blow outside the window.

WILLIAM BLAKE’S first solo art exhibition is to be re-staged, reuniting nine of the surviving works 200 years after they went on show.

AN erudite scholar of mathematics and Nobel Prize winner is visiting Tralee IT on September 8.

Paul Hanagan has made a terrific start to the new Flat campaign and booted home another winner in division one of the Alec And Dick 174 Not Out Maiden at Beverley.

Damien Enright on the charms of our winged friends

TODAY IS pleasantly cool, here in the Sierra Nevada, good weather for walking.

TO THE European explorers Australia seemed an ideal location for prisons.

THE spirits of the dead have their annual night out this week. Ghosts, goblins and witches will be on the prowl, so carry a rabbit’s foot for good luck and don’t walk under any ladders.

Kinks star Ray Davies called today for schoolchildren in the UK to be taught about British culture.

I SPENT a pleasant hour yesterday morning in the company of an acclaimed author, sipping coffee and discussing sexual anxiety, masturbation and football.

"It was a daunting prospect, but I think it sort of worked out," veteran British actor Anthony Hopkins says about revisiting Hollywood’s favourite psychopath, Hannibal Lecter, for a third time.