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The quintessential style of west coast America has crossed the Atlantic as the Ford Mustang California Special arrives in Europe for the first time.

The final chapter in the history of Shakespeare and Company, the famous Paris bookshop, began with the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in May 1939. The shop closed in December 1941 when a Nazi officer saw a copy of Joyce’s book in its window and asked to buy it. Sylvia Beach refused saying it was her only copy, and was not for sale. The officer threatened to return and confiscate her entire stock, and left. He returned the next day and demanded she sold him the book. Again Sylvia refused, and the officer, ‘trembling with rage’ warned that he would be back that afternoon and seize all her books.

There has never been a concentration of outstanding literary and artistic talent such as that in the Paris of the 1920s. The city heaved with outrage and ecstasy at the paintings of Piccaso, and Henri Matisse, the music of Igor Stravinsky, and the wild dancing of Joséphine Baker at the Folies Bergere, and the most extraordinary avant-garde literature, where new boundaries were created by a wave of modernist writers, the most celebrated being James Joyce.

Returning to Paris after an unsuccessful and troublesome visit to Galway in April 1922, Nora and her two children, Georgio (17) and Lucia (15) became aware that fame had come to the Joyces. Three months after its publication, Ulysses was recognised as a work of genius.

BAILE BEAG Mór, the first of eight world premieres being presented by Fíbín as part of its first season in residence in An Taibhdhearc, continues into next month.

On Friday morning in Bohermore former players from one of the great clubs in the town, Galway Hibernians, will gather to reflect on old matches and memories.

Gregory stayed at the Algonquin Hotel, on 44th Street, a few blocks from the Maxine Elliott Theatre where JM Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World, opened on Monday November 27 1911. This was the Abbey Theatre’s first tour of America, and it was much anticipated. But its opening night was brought to a standstill by riotous and disruptive behaviour by a yahoo Irish element, who objected to its depiction of Irish womanhood. The play continued only after the police dragged off the worst offenders to jail.

SITTING BY a river in the south of France on a windy day in 1980, as November and the dark and cold drew in, Eddi Reader made a decision that would change the course of her life, and define it over the next 40 years.

Nothing shut the mouths of the Irish yahoos faster than to see Augusta Lady Gregory enter the Maxine Elliot Theatre, New York, arm in arm with Teddy Roosevelt, probably America’s greatest president. Their jaws must have hit the floor in amazement as they were well prepared for a total assault on the Abbey Theatre’s presentation of the Playboy of the Western World, and on its ‘pensioner’ spokesperson Lady Gregory.

The recent Claire Byrne Live special, in which audience members were invited to put their furrowed brows on display, and share with the nation their hesitations about voting Sinn Féin, was, you can be sure, the opening salvo in what will be a relentless attempt by the media to shore up support for Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Greens.