A poet, it was once said, is someone who must wait to be hit by lightning. There is no such patience extended to the newspaper columnist, certainly not a columnist who, like Frank McNally in The Irish Times, has been the chief writer of the Irishman’s Diary – now known as An Irish Diary – for 19 years. Four times a week, McNally writes the column. He suffers, he says, from ‘columnist’s gut’ – “the centre of my stomach is always in a little bit of a knot from worrying about how I’m going to fill the space tomorrow”. McNally…

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