Donald Trump’s exit is gratifying. The United States will now have a president who is decent, civil and honest. However, in a political society which has never been more divided and in which citizens have this year bought 17 million guns, uniting the people will not be easy.
I have met people, including some of my friends and their teenage children, who were proud to say, after the terrorist attacks, that they were definitely ‘not Charlie’. Many indeed felt that the cartoons led to Islamophobia and were an elitist insult to an oppressed and powerless minority.
Seamus Heaney pays tribute to a man beloved by his friends for his originality as a poet, his acuity as a critic, his probity and courage and merriment.
George Orwell taught us how to detect cant and doublespeak. He also had some views on language that would do credit to a retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells.
Two historians clash in a Belfast radio interview on the Famine. Did the British deliberately plan for genocide by ‘allowing nature to run its course’?
David William Sheehan writes: I learned to read power from a puppet throwing toast. Most afternoons of my Irish childhood ended in front of The Den with Zig and Zag, two aliens on a couch, telling each other and occasionally the nation to feck off.
Jonathan Becker writes: When I was packing up my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago after she died, I found an unusual book among her otherwise conventional collection: Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’. It was many years later that I would learn the book’s significance.
John Simmons writes: Is Homer the most influential writer of all time? We don’t know much about whoever he, she or they might have been, and we don’t know with any certainty how old The Iliad and The Odyssey are. They brought us the power of storytelling, and for that we should give them the highest praise.
Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment door.
Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection throws some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on the centre right and centre left.
Mike Gogan writes on Bloomsday: ‘Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.’ This is one of quite a few yeses in the last paragraphs of ‘The Dead’, the final short story in ‘Dubliners’ by James Joyce. In ‘Ulysses’, which was written after, the last word of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy faintly echoes this, ‘Yes’.
Raymond Geuss writes: Marx is generally considered to be a thinker who had little time for the spiritual dimension of human life. This is correct if the spiritual life is understood as depending on reference to theological or transhuman entities or to metaphysical properties.
Liam Kennedy writes: Sociologists, unlike historians, have long memories. My evidence for this – historians like evidence – is a sample of one, the former president of Ireland, Michael D Higgins.
Enda O’Doherty writes: Populists claim they represent the views of ‘ordinary people’, ignored by out-of-touch, ‘cosmopolitan’ political elites. But their methods of communicating with this segment of society are laden with calculation and condescension.