Our politicians could level with us on the Covid crisis, but for various reasons they chose not to

As well as the religious symbolism of Easter the idea of becoming new is very potent

TS Eliot's will contained a severe sentence: he did not wish to have a biography of himself published. With that in mind he had contrived the destruction of his early letters to his parents.

Samuel L Clemens dictated hundreds of pages of autobiography that ranged from the nonexistence of God to postal-service vagaries

US poet Ezra Pound, celebrated at a conference at Trinity, had close links with Irish writers and politicians and became Joyce’s unpaid agent

When he was nine, the young writer composed and printed a poem about Charles Stewart Parnell of which only a fragment is recorded. For a rare-book dealer, it’s thrilling to think a copy might be waiting to be discovered. Could it be hidden somewhere in Ireland?

The latest huge volume of the poet’s correspondence deals mainly with his failing first marriage, the complexities of his Anglican faith and his editorship of the ‘Criterion’