Jane Austen

Following my lament (Diary, Thursday) about interviewees starting all their sentences with “So”, a number of readers have made heartfelt pleas that I (...)

“Maybe there were no new stories, only your story. But what did the real story even matter, when most people judged you based on the shallowest surfac(...)

As mentioned in John Connell’s The Running Book, which I reviewed elsewhere in this paper recently, Co Longford may once have been home to the real-li(...)

Our first lesson learned looking for a new home: if it looks too good to be true, it’s too good to be true Ignorance is bliss. To a certain extent th(...)

Last weekend I went to see the house in Hampshire where Jane Austen spent the last years of her life and learnt something unexpected about the great a(...)

You can safely bet that any plea for linguistic pedantry – insisting on the original meaning of “staycation” for instance – will bring forth Professor(...)

You have to take your hat off to Anthony Peto. Since moving to Ireland four years ago, the British milliner has seriously landed on his feet. His hat (...)

The first customers began to walk into Kenny’s Bookshop a few minutes after it opened its doors on Monday for the first time in three months. It has b(...)

It is a nice irony that the must-watch TV series of the lockdown period is the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People – which is precisely (...)

You will be coming down with suggestions as to which hip series and zippy films are currently available to the broadband user. When stressfully isolat(...)