Offering illuminating insights throughout the year, the Diary pairs literary passages with corresponding holidays, historical anniversaries and elegant illustrations.

Irish Pages and its authors inhabit “the space outside” the Pale of the Received – business-as-usual in all its (especially Western) forms: literary, intellectual, cultural, social, political. The Diary celebrates this emphasis on original imaginative engagement with the world and its dilemmas, and is intended especially for all those readers for whom ethical issues count.

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“One task of literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.”

Susan Sontag from “Literature As Freedom”

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