James Joyce’s ear keenly attuned to music’s centrality in Irish life

The study of the author’s relationship to music is one of the oldest and most fertile of the critical strands that attend his writing

Henri Matisse: A jolt of happiness from a humanist painter

The French master’s art is ‘just what we need in this anxious, dark time’

Minding our own business – An Irishman’s Diary on what the Germans can teach us about celebrity and privacy

Fintan O’Toole: ‘Rural Ireland’ has been romanticised up to its neck

Piety about rural values never did anything to stop the receding tide of depopulation

Mary Swanzy, one of Ireland’s leading modernist painters

Artist achieved success in her lifetime only to be relatively forgotten in death

Huge prices for Picasso, Monet works at Rockefeller sale

Fillette a la Corbeille Fleurie sells for $115 million at Christie’s art sale

Peach review: Emma Glass’s visceral debut bears strange fruit

An extraordinary, powerful debut that looks at the aftermath of a rape

Classical highlights in November

At last, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is presenting ‘A celebration of contemporary Irish female composers’ at the NCH

Loadsa Monet: the rich Russian who patroned Picasso, made Matisse

After being trapped behind the Iron Curtain, Russia’s Shchukin collection, including works by Picasso and Matisse, is back in Paris for a blockbuster show

Championing women writers, broadening the mind

How a simple question began thousands of conversations and got a celebration started

Eileen Gray, thoroughly modern maker

Furniture designer and architect Eileen Gray died nearly 40 years ago but is back with us in a big way: a new book, film and TV special are all devoted to the life and work of the Irish woman who pioneered the Modern Movement

Woody Allen: ‘I am realistic in my appraisal of the human condition, but not realistic in my everyday life’

Recent scandals haven’t dimmed Woody Allen’s enthusiasm for making films – though he doesn’t understand why people still want to watch them

The camera sometimes lies: making myths through a lens

In these three edited extracts from his latest book, Rod Stoneman examines the real story behind sometimes misleading photographs of Che Guevara, the fall of Berlin and Ernest Hemingway

Shane MacGowan's Fairytale of Weatherfield: an Irish rover in the Rovers Return

Shane MacGowan and his much-loved Christmas song, Fairytale of New York, star in a special episode of Coronation Street. His partner writes about the visit and sharing pork scratchings with Peter Barlow