The critical role of mirth and laughter in a time of plague

Humour turns our discontents and anxieties into a joke and helps reconcile us to our fate

David Brooks: ‘Comments are so much more vicious than even 10 years ago’

The New York Times columnist can aggravate diehard liberals but his latest book merits a fair hearing

Catholic church: ‘Good Riddance or Good Influence?’

Three-day conference to examine role of Catholicism in pluralist Ireland

Successful publisher and left-wing campaigner

Neil Middleton: December 8th, 1931 - November 20th, 2015

Seán Moncrieff: ‘Irish people don’t deal with failure that well’

Moncrieff, whose new book is about the paradox of Irishness, talks about his own identity, the ‘village mentality’ at RTÉ and how the internet brings out ‘performance piety’ in people

Review: Wuthering Heights

The moors of Emily Brontë’s novel are raging and unruly, peaceful and polite. Is the new Gate adapation torn between two worlds?

Billy Collins: ‘When I start a poem, I assume the indifference of readers’

The former US poet laureate believes in bringing poetry to the widest possible audience. Some critics have found his poetry to be lacking in complexity, but he’ll take that over wilful obscurity any day

Passing the time at Enniskillen’s Happy Days festival

Conversations turn Beckettian when this festival of all things tragicomic doesn’t turn out as planned. Could it be any other way?

Samuel Beckett’s old school ties

Sean Doran wants to make Happy Days a ‘destination festival’, turning Enniskillen, where the playwright and novelist went to school, into a Mecca for his fans

Chalktalk: News and views in education

No transparency when schools are not open to Freedom of Information

A devout socialist’s tongue-in-cheek diatribe on US society

This cleverly provocative appraisal should be taken with a bushel of salt

Word for Word: Learning to get more out of reading