I read the Writers Almanac every day.  It is an email of the Poets Corner on PBS.   Keillor does a wonderful daily column at 

 writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Enjoy

 

Taken from The Writers Almanac

Garrison Keillor

June 10, 2014

Today is the birthday of the city of Dublin, founded in 988. The area had been occupied, more or less, since before the Roman invasion of Britain, and it appeared in Ptolemy's Guide to Geography in the year 140, but the first verifiable settlement came with the Vikings in about 831. They called it "Dyflin," which came in turn from the Irish Dubh Linn, which means "black pool." The reason it's considered to be founded in 988 rather than 831 is because that's the year the Irish king Máel Sechnaill reclaimed the city for Ireland. It's also the year he first forced people to pay him taxes, so Dublin has belonged to the Irish ever since, bought and paid for.

Dublin's contribution to literature alone has been remarkable. Ireland was one of the first countries to produce writing in the vernacular, and it's long had a tradition as a nation of scholars. A partial list of writers who are from Dublin, or who adopted it as their home, includes Jonathan Swift, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, Patrick Kavanagh, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, John Millington Synge, and Seamus Heaney.

"When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence." — Brendan Behan