Boy, by James Hanley (preface by Anthony Burgess, notes and appendix by Chris Gostick), Oneworld Classics, 300 pp, £7.99, ISBN: 978-1847490063 There have, of course, been a great many authors hailed as geniuses and then consigned either after death or, just as likely, after that difficult second novel to the dusty archives of canonical anonymity….

There are moments in our lives when we learn about something new, moments that give us a glow of satisfaction and wonder, the tickle of surprise. This new thing could be what we perceive to be our personal discovery of a painting on a cave wall, as if it hadn’t been there all along, or…

A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, Robson Books, 320 pp, ISBN: 978-186105974 In Fay Weldon’s short story “In the Great War (II)”, the protagonist, Ellen, kills herself and her daughter after being blamed by her lover for his wife’s suicide. But the unnamed narrator…

Michael Foot: A Life, by Kenneth O Morgan, Harper Collins, 512 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-007178261 Kenneth O Morgan has written extensively on twentieth century British history, mainly on Labour and on Wales. The Welsh connection is relevant because Foot, though Morgan stresses his credentials as part of a distinctly English tradition, was Aneurin Bevan’s successor in…

The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America, by Jeffrey Rosen, Times Books, 288 pp, $25, ISBN: 978-0805081824 The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner’s limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so…

The Curtain, by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher, Faber and Faber, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0571232819 From the accomplished past to the striving present, from the epic to the experimental, from the romantic to the realist, a network of threads runs through the history of literature, connecting disparate creations. In the…

The Luck Penny, by John Maher, Brandon, 294 pp, €14.99, ISBN: 978-0863223617 On a visit to her sister in London in 1849, Liza Drew, wife of the Rev John Drew, a minister in the small parish of Aghadoe in the Irish Midlands, bumps into her husband’s friend and fellow student of ancient scripts, Mr Westmacott….

Dreuchd an Fhigheadair/The Weaver’s Task: a Gaelic Sampler, edited and introduced by Crìsdean MhicGhillebhàin/Christopher Whyte, Scottish Poetry Library, 64 pp, £5.00, ISBN: 978-0953223589 out here in front of a tiny audience of halfhearted seals applauding It is almost obligatory when talking about Scots Gaelic to begin with a number. In 2001 it was 58,652. Writing…

The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry, by Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 432 pp, £25, ISBN: 978 0571227402 Horse Latitudes, by Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 80 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-0571232345 Few poets are happy to be described as mere emanations of their region of origin. It has been convenient for journalists…

As Pequenas Memórias, by José Saramago, Caminho, 149 pp, €9.45, ISBN: 972-2118315 The Nobel literature prizewinner José Saramago was born in 1922 in Portugal’s Ribatejo province. Best known in the English-speaking world for his novels from the 1980s and 1990s Baltasar and Blimunda, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, The History of the…

Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530-1750, by William J Smyth, Cork University Press, 640 pp, €69, ISBN: 978-0268017811 I first encountered Professor Smyth’s work in a 1988 volume called Common Ground in which he presented a 1659 “census” or countrywide poll tax listing of names in maps, illuminated by a…