An interview with American novelist Kent Haruf, whose stories of the high plains of Colorado, with their plain but perfectly crafted style and exacting verisimilitude, achieve a mythic dimension rare in contemporary fiction

A new history of the English-approved aristocracy of Ireland in the seventeenth century shows remarkable command of official sources but reads as if the other Ireland, that is the vast majority, scarcely existed.

Roger Casement’s sojourn in Germany is hugely significant for Ireland and England, and especially apposite now the 1914-16 centenary years are approaching.

Samuel Pepys, an insider whom the Glorious Revolution made an outsider, was a brilliant administrator, a great observer and a fine writer, a humane and tolerant man and a great lover of women.

Judith Butler and Sarah Schulman have each made significant contributions not just to gender studies and political action but to Jewish activist solidarity with the Palestinians.

Historians who cannot engage with Irish-language sources risk fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the public sphere, which in Ireland was long associated with orality and manuscript rather than print culture.

Big Houses may mean culture and civility, but they are also at the nub of a whole system of property, labour and production and engage the hard-headed qualities of the gentry as well as its more high-minded impulses.

In the 1970s an obscure provincial schoolmistress created an organisation to be reckoned with whose aim was to purge British television of filth and blasphemy.

A new book on the Latin American left asks profound questions about the quality of societies being constructed and comes up with a fascinating portrait of left-wing administrations seeking to balance their supporters’ demands with the dictates of market orthodoxy.