Recently, prompted by several factors including the ever-growing piles of books littering my home, I rejoined the public library. In the book, published in 2019, Thorn quotes from her diaries while revisiting her adolescence in a green belt town outside London in the 1970s. The second book I borrowed, Dorothy L Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life, by David Coomes, was published in 1992. One aspect of using public libraries is that a lot of the books on offer have been around for a while. Sayers was an English writer and public intellectual who produced a much-admired translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Source: The Irish Times March 17, 2026 02:32 UTC