Frank McCourt could scarce remember a time when the sun shone on the drab Limerick of ‘Angela’s Ashes’. I did the stupid thing of checking out the weather in those years of slosh and slop and lo, many of the summers and autumns were as dry as a cow pat on a humming July evening.

Barack Obama had all the qualities that make for a great president. Competent, incorruptible, calm yet decisive, he had a genuine care for how his governance affected ordinary people. He was truly a once-in-a-generation politician ‑ which makes his failures only more disheartening.

It is widely accepted that there was often collusion – and more ‑ between loyalist killers and parts of the security forces in the North. But the instinct of the British state apparatus is still towards denial. Avoidance, censorship and obfuscation have created a suffocating blanket of silence.

Ernest Bevin never knew who his father was and was orphaned aged eight. He started work as a farm labourer at eleven and later became a lay preacher and union organiser. As foreign secretary in the post-1945 Labour government he helped stiffen the Americans’ resolve to stand up to Stalin.

William Empson’s reputation as a severely intellectual critic can be offputting for anyone coming to him for the first time, but it’s a misleading view. His mission was in another direction altogether, seeking to clarify what appears abstruse by establishing roots in ordinary life.

Some of what passes for news comes not from ‘the coal face’ but from the fevered brains of its inventors. In a guide to news in the era of fake news Alan Rusbridger says Murdoch’s Fox News will have a ‘special place in journalistic hell’ for its Covid coverage, which contributed to numberless deaths.

The tempo of life in wartime is swift and changeable. Men and women come into and slip out of one’s life, never to be seen again. Have they been killed or just posted to another theatre? Mary Mulry from Galway experienced WWII in London and Europe and wrote about it movingly in her diary.

Edmund Burke is often regarded as the father of political conservatism, but his views were in many ways quite different from those of a more recent Tory icon: society not only existed but was a sacred partnership between the living, the dead and those who were yet to be born.

A new biographical study charts VS Naipaul’s progress from confidently judging the world to be simply ‘what it is’ to more ambivalently ‘charting a way in the world’. In later Naipaul, we find a writer more sympathetic to both his own past and the way others make sense of their lives.

The early 1960s saw Ireland engaging in a concentrated round of diplomatic activity focused on a hoped-for entry to the European Economic Community. When the French veto of the UK application in 1963 also derailed the Irish one, attention turned to a free trade agreement with Britain.

Philosophers, John Gray argues, imagine that life can be ordered by reason and principle, an absurd notion a cat would never subscribe to. Gray sees our lives as random events and our natures as determined by the body. But foolishly we find it difficult to accept that we are mere creatures of biology and chance.

Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard gives us, between the lines, the sense of a man who, while charming, could be driven and sometimes emotionally distant. He also seems to have been remarkably keen to live what he saw as the traditional life of the English gentleman.

Donal Ryan has, in previous work, established his facility for inhabiting the minds and spirits of his characters through deft deployment of varying narrative points of view. In his new novel he opts for authorial omniscience, a strategy he employs skilfully and with radiant effect.

The proportion of Irish men who acknowledged responsibility for the ‘illegitimate’ children they had fathered was low. Few single women had the resources to raise a child without the support of the father or of their family, neither of which, in many cases, was available.

It is curious how ‘mimesis’, the ability to accurately depict nature, ‘skill’, the deployment of acquired manual dexterity, and ‘beauty’, formerly key elements in judging art, have been downgraded by the art industry gatekeepers in favour of the charms of the ‘innovative’ and the ‘cutting edge’.

The runaway slave Tony Small saved the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald after a battle in the American War of Independence. The two became close, with Fitzgerald hiring Small as his personal servant and taking him with him on his travels, to revolutionary France and ultimately Dublin.

What is alluring about dogs includes ‘their freedom, their lack of inhibition’, their dwelling in the moment – without apprehensiveness, but without hope. This is enviable in a way, yet we don’t entirely want it. Having a pet can extend one’s being, but it needn’t make one want to be a pet.

Aunt Betty wasn’t who she said she was. Also known as Eileen and Patricia, she liked to be called Munca, after Beatrix Potter’s pet mouse. Getting on in life ‑ moving on, moving up ‑ was her compulsion, and any lie, any hurt to her family, could be justified along the way.

Fermentation is a familiar process in food preparation but has also long been used as a metaphor for societal change, cultural change, political change, economic change. Driven by bacteria, it is a force that cannot be stopped. It recycles life, renews hope, and goes on and on.

Hassan Blasim’s fictional work has shown extraordinary literary vision and innovation, leaving the reader stunned by the formidable method in the seeming madness of his narrative techniques, which drive realism and surrealism into a wildly intimate encounter.

The catalyst for the growth of the world economy, manufacturing, which sparked into life in the nineteenth century and generated vast amounts of wealth, has finally exhausted itself, a new book argues. But will the end of growth also necessarily imply the end of work?

It has plausibly been suggested that we now have the capability to transform the five fundamentals of the global economy ‑ information, energy, transport, fuel and materials ‑ into sustainable production at minimal costs compared to the present. The problem is that we lack the will.

Yeats Now: Echoing into Life, by Joseph M. Hassett, was published by Lilliput Press in September. Below we reprint its introduction. The Dublin Review of Books will publish a review of the work in the new year.

Derek Mahon is not a poet to calm or ease the mind. He keeps us alert, thinking, in flux. It is hard to accept that ‘Washing Up’ will be his last word. Perhaps this is the greatest gift, that this posthumous volume shows a talent so utterly undiminished, so equal to the challenge of contemporary life.

In the early decades of the independent state, a woman who wished to flee her husband’s violence encountered a host of economic, legal and social obstacles. She had few legal remedies and no access to divorce. She was almost certain to be financially dependent.

Richard Murphy’s publishing life began in the 1950s and culminated in his collected poems in 2013. His poetry has its feet firmly in the last century, while the late poems and prose projects, including his marvellous memoir The Kick, firmly establishes him in this one.

Throughout her new collection, Mary O’Donnell proves herself a smooth stylist, converting ideas, emotions, opinions into genuine poems that have a visible and an invisible subject. It helps that her imagination is a sturdy one.

Bipolar disorder has been explained as an attempt to create a world in which everything is either black or white. The illness can only be treated, it is suggested, when the important third element is introduced.

Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short spaces.

Those Germans who argue so vehemently against a so-called transfer union should realise that the EU has always been such a union. France got the CAP for its large rural economy and Germany the common market for its strong industry. Little has changed since.

DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind of opinionated prickliness when things are not what they seem to be or should be.

Unsentimental, sparing and unspecific, the painter Patrick Pye has sought figurative images to represent symbolically “the archetypes of our humanity” depicted in an alternative universe where expiation has been achieved.

A former minister for enterprise famously suggested that while Ireland was physically closer to Berlin it was spiritually, and economically, closer to Boston. As our neighbouring island prepares to push off into the North Atlantic, it is worth asking if this is still a tenable orientation for the state.

The following is an extract from Emer Nolan’s Five Irish Women: The second republic, 1960-2016, published this month by Manchester University Press.

The Irish in New York faced much of the same hostility from a Protestant establishment that wished to exclude them as they did at home. But eventually they came to belong, based on their service in the US army their role in maintaining law and order, their political skills, and, not least, their sheer numbers.

This fascinating miscellany comprises seventy-nine short pieces on marriage practices in Ireland over approximately 1,300 years. During this period the institution of marriage was organised around property, status, succession and, in the case of the elite, politics.

In Fred Johnston’s new collection the subject is the experience of cancer or suspected cancer. The prevailing mood is one of grim fatalism; there is no belief in the medical world doing good. This is a world without Ms Nightingales.

A history of the interactions between Ireland and Scotland over two millennia, told in a series of 120 episodes, ranges entertainingly from the Roman governor Agricola’s plan to invade Ireland from Scotland to 21^st century pitch invasions at Ibrox and Celtic Park.

The cultural absorption or lack of it of large immigrant communities may not have predictable outcomes. The relationship between culture and politics, it seems, is not straightforward and drawing political conclusions from cultural practices is an inexact business.

A new anthology of works of fiction translated into English is modest about its ambitions and disclaims any ambition to be ‘canonical’. Nevertheless it is a smartly executed work, which invites us to fill in some gaps in our literary education and ‘get out a bit more’.

Once independence was won, the question facing Irish ideologues and leaders was how to make revival real. It was then that the tenuous and tentative nature of the relation between the cultural and the political became clear. Those different spheres would never march in lockstep.

In Berlin, an old building is being repurposed for use as a computer store. In the middle of a bleak winter, the construction workers have inadequate time, inadequate resources, speak many different languages and have managers fresh from the Celtic Tiger building boom. Nothing can go wrong.

The indomitable Grace O’Malley, pirate queen, is the heroine of a new graphic novel that will entertain and inform children from nine years upwards.

Nano Nagle’s emphasis on educating the Catholic poor had a political dimension and contributed to the integration of the several parts of Catholic Ireland into a whole which had the potential of politically focusing the majority. In this sense it is not too fanciful to see her  work as prefiguring that of O’Connell.

A Ukrainian proverb can be taken to illustrate our human attraction – and perhaps our occasional uneasiness about that attraction – to alcohol, its pleasures and dangers. “The church is near,” it goes, “and the tavern is far. It is snowing heavily. I shall walk carefully.”

O’Connell’s Monster Meetings came to an abrupt halt in October 1843 when the Viceroy  mobilsed four battalions of troops, some four hundred armed RIC and Metropolitan Police and moved three gunships into Dublin Bay 

In a poem about O’Connell Street’s Spire, the monument becomes a dagger, a skewer, an extended middle finger. None of the names are inclusive of us, the citizens; the Spire is the ‘we’ reduced to ‘I’, which might be seen as the opposite of Boran’s project, to expand the ‘I’ to ‘we’.