What is the capital of Ireland?

Dublin, from the Irish dubh linn, black pool - the tidal pool where the Poddle met the Liffey and where Vikings moored their longships in the ninth century. The Irish name in ordinary use is different: Baile Atha Cliath, the town of the hurdled ford, referring to a separate Gaelic settlement upstream. The city has carried two unrelated names for a thousand years.

It is one of very few cities with a literary map you can walk. Joyce's Ulysses follows a single day, 16 June 1904, in such specific detail that he claimed the city could be rebuilt from the book, and the day is now marked annually as Bloomsday with people retracing the route. Dublin has produced four Nobel laureates in literature - Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney - and was named a UNESCO City of Literature.

The Georgian squares that give the centre its character were built during the eighteenth century, when Dublin was the second city of the British Empire and had its own parliament. That ended with the Act of Union in 1801, after which the aristocracy left for London and the great houses were subdivided into tenements - by the early twentieth century Dublin had some of the worst slum conditions in Europe, in buildings that are now among its most expensive addresses.