Festivals in Ireland 2025: From Longitude to All Together Now - a guide to 80 of the best
From Brigit and Dublin Lunar New Year to Culture Night, Space Week and Cork Jazz Festival, here’s our round-up of cultural showcases to catch this year
Pat Barker
Pat Barker: ‘I don’t think revenge is entirely pointless. But it’s certainly cyclical’
The author on her latest Iliad-inspired work, The Voyage Home; how not knowing her father’s identity has driven her work; and the strange business of film adaptations
Learwife by JR Thorp: A brilliant fleshing-out of King Lear’s forgotten woman
Vivid reimagining of the queen shows the Shakespearean scholar what they’re missing
The Women of Troy: No country for women
Pat Barker’s sequel continues her vivid reimagining of Greek mythology
ClassicsNow festival set to bring ancient Greece and Rome to life
Theatre, dance and literature events can all be enjoyed online
On My Culture Radar: Mary McEvoy
The actor on the appeal of Helen Mirren and discovering the artistry of Odilon Redon
100 books by women you have to read
Iris Murdoch, Edna O’Brien, Marian Keyes and Eimear McBride all appear on the list
Fintan O’Toole’s top British novels
The Irish Times literary editor was one of 82 foreigners polled by the BBC to choose the 100 best British novels. Read how he got on
Artists in the Blitz. Book review: Noonday by Pat Barker
The last in a trilogy about a trio of artists is at its best in the Blitz, writes Eileen Battersby
Reclaiming the war: Army of ghosts
War writing at heart is about the ambivalence of loyalty to class, nation, and friends, and of belief and the business of being human, and more recent Irish writing on the Great War, in reopening a closed chapter in our history, is no different in exploring all those ambiguities
Irish experience of shell shock in the first World War
Psychiatrist Brendan Kelly recounts how the condition was treated in an Irish hospital in his book
Death in paradise: Adrian McKinty and the strange case of the Cocovores
The crime writer has turned away from Northern Ireland for his new novel, about a murder in a German nudist religious cult in the South Pacific a century ago
Jimmy McGovern: ‘We should be in a golden age of drama but we’re not’
Ahead of an appearance at the Galway Film Centre, Jimmy McGovern, writer of TV dramas Cracker, Hillsborough and Sunday, is frank about being a ‘troublesome leftie’, meeting Martin McGuinness and bad writing
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