There are many reasons to change one’s name: to keep a step ahead of the law, to be accepted in a different or superior social circle, or, just conceivably, to dump the last politically determined change and return a little closer to one’s origins.

A new anthology of the writings of the Irish Revival demonstrates that literature is written in a context. But if the ludicrous decision to downgrade the teaching of history in secondary schools is not reversed, similar volumes in the future will be incomprehensible.

In 1603, William Shakespeare was, among other things, an English dramatist. With the accession of James Stuart of Scotland to the English throne he was to have to learn to become a British one.

St Crispin’s Day, the day on which the Battle of Agincourt was fought six hundred years ago, was a glorious one for England. Its memory was called upon at another difficult time in the mid-twentieth century, but the Agincourt battle scenes in Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V’ were in fact filmed in Ireland.

Ireland in the early 1890s was a country in paralysis, but over the next thirty years it began to move again as ideas bubbled up and were debated in new journals, clubs and societies. A new anthology catches the cultural ferment of that era.

The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has written a sharp analysis of the moral world of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, though her theories on its anonymous publication may tell us more about Ferrante’s motives than Austen’s.

Exiled to the remote south by Mussolini’s fascist regime, painter, writer and medical doctor Carlo Levi found there a peasant society that had apparently remained untouched by civilisation or modernity.

A new novel by Kevin Stevens tells of the frustrations and confusions of adolescence, the precarious position of immigrants in an indifferent or hostile host society and the consolations of friendship, love and music.

Artists and painters have long been fascinated by the weather and have not ceased to be so even in an era where mystery and religious speculation have largely moved over for science. Our tendency to worship nature suggests a question: is God the thing we see when we look up?

One critic has compared reading Charles Maturin’s Melmoth to climbing Mount Everest, yet the novel continues to appeal, in part perhaps because of its role in creating a genre that is still potent in global culture –in Hollywood movies, popular music and manga animation.