• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

5 places where modernism survived

Adapting or recasting the formal experiments of their modernist forebears...Here is a brief tour of five places where modernism survived well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry

The work and life of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) were, in Bill Clinton’s words, a gift to the world: ‘His mind, heart, and his uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives.’

The Burns Supper: A New Field of Study

By Dr Paul Malgrati Over the past 220 years, the Burns Supper has become the quintessential festival of Scottish culture, identity, and gastronomy. Who would have thought, back in 1801 as nine admirers of Robert Burns held a private memorial…

Four Irish Persephones

By Virginie Trachsler The young Persephone is gathering flowers in a meadow when her uncle Hades, god of the underworld, rises through a crack in the earth and abducts her on his golden chariot. Her mother Ceres wanders the earth…

Walter Scott the “mighty minstrel” and Marmion

Walter Scott’s poetry dominated the early years of the nineteenth century but has subsequently fallen into relative obscurity. The first scholarly edition of Marmion (1808), the second of Scott’s grand historical narrative poems, has recently been published and sets out…