Innocence and experience: RTÉ journalist publishes a diary from the first lockdown

Carole Coleman’s book recalls the bewildering confusion of the spring of 2020

Put down The Plague, a novel by De Maistre is more hopeful

In lockdown for 42 days in 1794, author finds pleasure ‘in travelling round one’s room’

Tippling Point – Frank McNally on similarities between the coronavirus crisis and the Great Plague of 1665

Fintan O’Toole: ‘The withering god of fever swoops on us’

Artists have always sought to find meaning in pandemics, plagues and mass infections

Coronavirus containment: what we can learn from the Black Death

Did practice of closing people into their houses or ‘shutting up’ work?

How the Mity have Risen – Frank McNally on the (short) literary history of cheese mites

Cry of the banned cheese – Frank McNally on Stilton’s lost cause

Fintan O’Toole: Eoin Morgan showed England its better self

The Irish captain of England's triumphant cricket team knocked xenophobia for six

Ode to a Grecian sojourn – the enduring mystique of islands

An Irishman’s Diary: Getting a taste for Robinsonade, a 300-year-old literary genre

The crossdresser from Dublin who tricked the British Army

Christian Davies donned her missing husband’s clothes and went to war to find him

London Letter: 18th century resistance to foreign voices

Opera found itself at the centre of a struggle between internationalism and Englishness

Chris Johns: Forecasts provide a buffer against inconvenient uncertainty

Perhaps with our new-found awareness of the fragility of forecasts, we can use them in more productive ways

Did the Famous Five come from Cork?

Bandon-born children’s writer LT Meade’s ‘Four on an Island’ shares similarities with Enid Blyton’s ‘Five on a Treasure Island’, published 50 years later

An A-Z of stories of the sea, from Conrad to Cervantes, Defoe to Patrick O’Brian

Norman Freeman got a taste for maritime yarns studying for his radio officer’s certificate in Kevin Street. As his own book comes out, he explores the classics of the tradition