Search Results for 'Byron'

Galway was given fascinating insights into the turbulent life of one of Europe’s men of genius last weekend. Music for Galway, which continues to present the very best classical music in innovative and challenging ways, devoted three days exploring the literary and musical passion of the great Ludwig van Beethoven. And, would you believe it? Gave us both an Irish and a Galway connection.

If anyone thought that academics sharing their enthusiasm for the landscape, writers and artists associated with Coole Park, Co Galway, would be boring and stuffy, they had a surprise last weekend. There were some jaw-dropping moments when Lady Augusta Gregory’s secret love affair was revealed; and when WB Yeats went off the rails in the years following her death, and had a series of love affairs.

She was a vivacious, witty young woman, intelligent, interested in everything, passionate about her country, and determined to make her own way in a man’s world. He was an elderly, brilliant, and very eccentric scientist. Yet these two became friends, and she has left us a vivid and very funny account of their late-blooming friendship.

“LAUGHTER IS by definition healthy,” said the author Doris Lessing, while Lord Byron advised: “Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.”

In the midst of our miserable weather, and dire financial troubles the series of ‘unfortunate’, or at least most unusual, events continued last year. Stringing them all together, as Dr Kieran Hickey does in his interesting book* reminds us that little old Ireland, blessed and loved by the saints, a ‘nation cradled in the arms of St Patrick’ (as I was taught in national school), is, alas, not excluded from strange geophysical events such as extreme weather conditions, including volcanoes and earthquakes, as we may have once believed. Although it was extremely rare for all these events to happen in the same year, I am sorry to say that having spoken to Dr Hickey this week, we’d better batten down the hatches, and prepare for a worse walloping to come. Just over 200 years ago the weather gave Mary Shelley monstrous dreams...but more of that in a moment.

THOMAS MOORE is a man torn. He is celebrated in Britain and on the continent for his songs and lyrics about his native Ireland. Yet his country is a colony of the fast growing British empire. As he reaches his autumn years he ponders on his life’s work. Has he been a patriot or is he just an entertainer for his colonial overlords?

THOMAS MOORE is a man torn. He is celebrated in Britain and on the continent for his songs and lyrics about his native Ireland. Yet his country is a colony of the fast growing British empire.