Colm Toibin’s new novel, Nora Webster, has been garnering some very high praise from the critics.

A new book celebrates the seasons. But tell me again, how many of them are there?

New Labour and others enthusiastically embraced a model of society which relegated many people to the margins while embracing and celebrating the buccaneer virtues. We have seen where that got us. Is it too late for the left to think again?

Adam Thirlwell wishes us to contemplate the writer as great soul, cast out of bourgeois society for his compulsion for truth-telling. But the examples he chooses seem a little strange.

Doing good is all very well, but best to keep it to one’s self. Being good is a more slippery matter still, and the good man often shares a bed with the bad one.

The English know that nothing is really ever going to change, so, well, you have to larf, innit? But they are missing out on the far superior feelings of satisfaction and self-righteousness to be gleaned from denunciation.

Germany, like Britain, is seeing the publication of a slew of books on the hundredth anniversary of the Great War.

There are 100,000 fewer librarians in the United States than there were twenty years ago. And in Ireland we are planning to open libraries with no staff. Oh brave new world!

A new book by David Runciman argues that democracies are superior to autocracies when it comes to riding out crises. Perhaps, but are they any longer fully democratic?

Jeanette Winterson makes a plea for the autonomy of the imagination and the role of the non-rational in explaining to us who we are.