Search Results for 'Literature'

Coole Park will play host to a series of walks for families in the coming weeks.

The Galway Arts Festival has become such an enormous event (in fact it is now an international event of significance), that it is a bit like the Lisbon Treaty: You can’t see all of it; and while many of us see its value to the community, there are parts of it I don’t quite like.

In Roy Foster’s impressive biography of WB Yeats* he tells an interesting anecdote concerning the sinking of the RMS Lusitania off the Cork coast on May 7 1915. The Galway writer Violet Martin (the second half of the caustic but amusing Sommerville and Ross duo), was walking by the sea near Castletownshend, Co Cork, when she saw the Lusitania pass in ‘beautiful weather’. Half and hour later, as the ship steamed passed the Old Head of Kinsale on her way to Liverpool, it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Nearly 2,000 people perished.

THE WONDERFUL characters of Dr Seuss will gather at the Town Hall next month for a musical performance with The Cat in the Hat as the MC for the evening.

THE ATHENRY Musical Society will hold an information night and audition for its next show Seussical - a musical adaptation of the books of Dr Seuss.

Three gorgeous girls holidaying in the beach town of Mallorca meet four charming British boys and end up completely isolated on a luxurious yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean. After meeting the guys in a nightclub, the girls are determined to let their hair down and set off with them on the yacht to party.

TOMORROW, SATURDAY, and Sunday, the fabled Coole Park plays host to the 14th annual Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering which, as ever, features a top-notch array of speakers and performers coming together to celebrate Lady Gregory and her world.

IN THE 1960s TV series Batman was ‘The Caped Crusader’, but in the much darker films of more recent years, he is ‘The Dark Knight’.

You might think that those at the core of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, were one big happy family beavering away in their rooms at Lady Gregory’s home at Coole, Co Galway. In those early days it was a house full of voices and sounds. Sometimes you heard WB Yeats humming the rhythm of a poem he was cobbling together; or the click-clacking of Lady Gregory’s typewriter as she worked on another play for the Abbey. There was the sound of the Gregory grandchildren playing in the garden; the booming voice of George Bernard Shaw, as he complains that he is only allowed to have either butter or jam on his bread, but not both to comply with war rations (He cheated by the way. He put butter on one side of his bread, and when he thought no one was looking, piled jam on the other!); or the voices of the artist Jack Yeats and JM Synge returning from a day messing about on a boat calling out to a shy Sean O’Casey to come out of the library for God’s sake and enjoy the summer afternoon.

Ireland has every possibility of getting back the 39 controversial paintings, willed to the Irish people by art collector Sir Hugh Lane at the beginning of the 20th century, but which remain in London because the codicil to his will was not witnessed. “Hugh Lane’s intentions were absolutely clear”, the dynamic director of the Hugh Lane (formerly Dublin City) Gallery, Ms Barbara Dawson said in Coole last weekend, “there is no reason on earth why the paintings are not on Irish soil permanently.”