Welcome to the A to Z of Historical Blunders, the show that reminds us about the dangers of history repeating itself.

This week, our dial will oscillate backwards and forwards throughout time as we explore the role of language and literature throughout history.

Where would we be without the written word? The evolution of hieroglyphs to cursive script to digitally printed letters has brought us to a point in history where we are so in the ‘now’ that the past (as LP Hartley reminds us) really is a foreign country. Without the written word, would we be better storytellers? Would we be better listeners? Would we have better memories? Yes, they did things differently back then, but their motives were the same as ours. The thread was always language, the language that created and wrote our histories.

This weeks guests are Nessa O’Mahony and Maeve O’Sullivan. Nessa O’Mahony is a Dublin born author, she has published 4 books of poetry and has recently published her new complex political thriller set in Galway, The Branchman.

Maeve O’Sullivan teaches at a college of further education in Dublin. Her poetry and haiku have been widely published, anthologised and translated for the last twenty years. She is the author of four collections from Alba Publishing (UK): Initial Response (2011), Vocal Chords (2014), A Train Hurtles West (2015) and Elsewhere (2017). Maeve is a founder member of the Hibernian Poetry Workshop and Haiku Ireland, and performs with the spoken word collective The Poetry Divas. She also leads workshops in haiku / poetry, and writes book reviews from time to time. Twitter @writefromwithin.

The article on which this episode is based can be read here.