“I’m standing amid a polyglot chorus of holiday-makers and day-trippers on top of the Acropolis, Instagramming a cityscape of northern Athens and sharing it on Facebook…” In the cradle of civilisation, Mark O’Brien senses something new emerging…

So, it’s finally here. No, not the XXXth Olympiad in London, not even the cultural Olympiad that goes alongside, no. This is the Arbuturian Olympiad. A range of events in the capital that offer a meditative alternative to the mania…

When an earnest, bookish young man travelled all the way to Zurich and met James Joyce, one of the greatest writers not only of his age but of all time, he asked: “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?”