Nature is beyond our control, and lost ecosystems cannot be fully recovered. Yet our own survival depends on how we deal with questions of environmental conservation and restoration – and there are reasons for optimism, despite the reality of climate change and the scale of the problem.

A new collection confines itself to poems about the city of Dublin but does not lack breadth or variety, spanning the centuries, including outsider as well as insider perspectives, and placing the old in dialogue with the new.

 Few now believe that the positions of the high and the lowly are ordained by God, but the increasingly entrenched political defenders of the super-rich still maintain that massive inequality is in the nature of things and must at all costs be preserved. As Gore Vidal said and Thomas Piketty’s study confirms, it’s not enough to succeed - others must fail.

Surgery, and perhaps particularly neurosurgery, can be profoundly rewarding. But there is always the possibility of mistakes, those little slips that can lead to disaster and another headstone in the cemetery that all surgeons carry around with them.

In the midsummer of 1914, Ireland’s nationalist and unionist communities were on a collision course over developments affecting the future government of Ireland. Just as the crisis was about to materialise in violence, it was averted – for the moment – by a larger conflict.

The people known as the Normans flourished in many parts of Europe in the early centuries of the second millennium AD. Their castles and fortifications are found as far west as Ireland, as far south as southern Italy and Sicily and as far east as Antioch.

A well-drawn portrait of our greatest artist that recounts some of the adventures of his life and work might be just the thing to perk up the days and weeks beyond Bloomsday, when, as like as not, rain could well again be general over Ireland.