Over the following decades, the Somozas acquired dozens of the biggest farms, the meat factories where the cattle were slaughtered and the dairies where milk was pasteurised, the sugar mills, mines, the national airline and cement factories. They controlled all the illegal businesses too – brothels, gambling dens and home-distilled liquor. The elder Somoza, assassinated in 1956, had once described Nicaragua as his personal ranch.

As the party that one-time communist Sahra Wagenknecht has named after herself puts down roots in German politics, its rivals are unsettled. How do you tackle an opaque, populist rival with generous – but unclear – sources of funding? ‘If the despots of this world understand that you can build a papier-mâché party in the largest EU member state with a few million,’ Kevin Kühnert, the social democrats’ general secretary warns, ‘then we are facing a development that could put our liberal democracy under great pressure.’

Lehmann had envisaged a life at the cottage for herself and the writer Goronwy Rees. The two had met at Bowen’s Court when Elizabeth Bowen had earmarked Rees for herself, but he made off with the younger and more attractive Lehmann. When she learned of her lover’s forthcoming marriage to someone else, there followed an episode of emotional unrestraint: ‘beating of head, lying senseless on the floor, calling for brandy, screams and cries’. But she pulled herself together, having no alternative.

Winston Churchill famously said that negotiation – ‘meeting jaw to jaw’ – was better than war. Two recently performed Irish plays recreate pivotal moments in Irish history when an attempt was made to shift politics from the gun to the ballot paper. The first, the Dáil debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, broke down and led to civil war, while the second, the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement, was ultimately successful.

Eilís Ward attacks the late modern self that she says capitalism has created for us: one that is ‘competitive, autonomous, resilient, responsibilised, perfectible, and positive’, qualities which when aggregated render us ‘human capital’. There is a point here, but many world religions and existential philosophies also ask us to turn to our better angels and cultivate being resilient and positive, even sometimes competitive.

John Maynard Keynes said that he had been brought up to regard Free Trade not just as an economic doctrine but almost as part of the moral law. When he started to publicly doubt its universal applicability in all circumstances, Virginia Woolf and his close friends were horrified. ‘Maynard has become a Protectionist,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘which horrified me so that I promptly fainted.’

Twain’s novel has always been controversial. It was long considered vulgar and crass by self-appointed guardians of public taste. Lifted to classic status in the twentieth century by among others Eliot and Hemingway, it has nevertheless been under renewed censorial scrutiny since 1957, when the NAACP charged that it contained racial slurs and ‘belittling racial designations’. Yet, though consistently on the list of books most frequently banned in American schools and libraries, its literary merit is rarely disputed.

From her magnificent house on Usher’s Island, Lady Moira promoted aspiring authors including Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan. Thomas Dermody and Thomas Moore were also associated with the salon, whose hostess was particularly concerned with promoting the Irish language and the customs and cultures of ancient Ireland, and antiquarians and translators were invited to contribute to the gatherings’ discussions.

The 2008 crash was exacerbated by neoliberal policies: no regulation of finance, privatisation, tax-cutting, boosting demand during a boom, a push for ever-lower taxation and the downgrading of the public sphere. All parties had contributed to the earlier growth period, with investment in education and skills and active state intervention in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in choosing growth sectors.

Few states, Joe Lee observed, have made such a heavy emotional investment as Ireland in the rhetoric of neutrality while paying so little attention to it as policy. For many, particularly on the left, it has become a sacred cow. Successive governments have rejected what they see as ‘scaremongering’ over possible NATO membership but steadfastly refuse to define or even debate what our neutrality consists of.

If some of the valuable heritage of the Enlightenment is to be salvaged this would surely involve jettisoning the notion of progress as an irresistible force. It would also require an understanding of personal freedom which recognised that virtually all personal enterprise is dependent on society, whose interests should predominate. Finally, we need a more modest approach to the power of reason, a healthy scepticism towards overarching explanations of life, an acceptance that ignorance remains our dominant condition and that we are but one life form among many.

In keeping with his generally progressive positions, Francis Hackett actively supported women’s rights and suffrage, as testified by ‘Where Women Disagree: The battle for the female vote’, an article he wrote for ‘The New Republic’ in 1915. His marriage to Signe Toksvig, a strongly feminist Danish-American writer also on the magazine staff, meant that the issue would remain at the centre of the couple’s lives.

Friel’s father was headmaster of a three-room school near Omagh in Co Tyrone, which Brian attended until he was ten. A new teaching post brought the family to Derry. Brian, like his two sisters, later also became a teacher. Interestingly enough, his subject was maths rather than English or languages. Derry during the war years was crammed with American soldiers: ‘the troops […] reached 40,000, a number equal to the city’s entire pre-war population’. His lifelong interest in America may well have begun at this point.

The need for the continued existence of trusted public service broadcasters is greater than ever. However, RTÉ cannot claim to hold those in power to account if it appears to exempt itself from similar accountability. Considerable respect and affection still exist in the minds of many Irish people for the national broadcaster. In many respects, that is its most precious asset. It would be deeply unfortunate if it were to be put at any further risk.

The echo of Yeats’s voice in Seamus Heaney’s letters is a fascinating example of the way in which a poet’s words can achieve a form of immortality by virtue of their adoption by successor poets. The same process will certainly also happen to Heaney himself. The third century BC poet Callimachus captured this poetic communion in an elegy for his friend Heraclitus, in which the voice of the deceased poet can still be heard in the nightingale’s song.

Marta is comfortable speaking Ukrainian, even if it’s not her first language. She’d like her daughter to speak it too, though she doesn’t want to live there once the war is over. The words ‘once the war is over’ were mine. People are traumatised, in the grip of circumstance, not completing thoughts. They’re readying themselves for the least bad future, if still hopeful for anything.

We are witnessing an unprecedented level of human mobility, and this is set to continue. The total number of migrants today is some 281 million, or just over 3 per cent of the world population. Migrants are present in every country, most of them moving back and forth freely. It is wrong to frame migration, as many do, as a ‘problem’, still less as a ‘crisis’. Rather it is a reality, a fact of life, an essential part of the human condition.

Born to communist parents in 1935, at the height of the Depression, and in a neighbourhood almost entirely made up of working class Jews, Vivian Gornick is a representative of a dying breed – one forged in the crucible of twentieth century history and its twin political forces of socialism and feminism, experienced through a secular Jewish identity. Her ambition to write was quite singular and the form it first took perhaps even more so. ‘I grew up wanting to write the Great American Novel,’ she has said. Some chutzpah.

The local codes are, in fact, those of the serial nature of Ogham script. The charge of the ‘geographical distance’ exemplified by the work is hard to reconcile with its presence in Cobh, an historic point of departure for countless emigrants. Cobh is as synonymous with emigration as Ellis Island or Holyhead.

Stone also worked for a succession of mainstream politicians, including Richard Nixon. He told me he owned the world’s largest collection of Nixon memorabilia, and even had a large tattoo of the former president’s face on his back. I assumed he was joking, but I later saw for myself that he wasn’t.

Sappho has always been threatened and often marginalised, her work disparaged as inconsequential or emotional, gossipy or bitchy. Yet she was also recognised as a supremely gifted lyric poet. Solon, when asked why he wanted to hear a particular poem by her, replied ‘Because once I’ve learned it, I can die.’

How spiritually deadening to live in a city which no longer even talks about ‘waiting’ for economic growth to yield benefits to labour. How dehumanising to know that instead of clearing the urban poor to new homes in the suburbs, the government cleans up their tents. How enraging to hear that your right to shelter is significantly less than your landlord’s right to raise the rent for no good reason.

Anna Parnell meticulously appraises the problematic elements of the Land League's No Rent Manifesto, the worst of which was its promise of bottomless funds from America to cover all necessary supports to tenants, who were assured: 'If you are evicted, you shall not suffer.' As she puts it, ‘the language used was directly calculated to cause extra trouble for those who had to administer the funds’ and bore the hallmark of people who believe that ‘anything that they never tried themselves is very easy’.

The larger political parties have in recent decades courted young urban progressives where once they had sought to appeal to social conservatives, rural voters and religious Catholics. These shifts appeared to ignore a significant minority who might be sceptical of the new progressive consensus. Now, to some extent, a course correction may be under way with a tonal shift to the right in Irish politics on culture war and immigration issues.

‘There are two forces forming our tastes,’ Chayka writes. ‘The first is our independent pursuit of what we individually enjoy, while the second is our awareness of what it appears that most other people like, the dominant mainstream.’ It seems obvious to me that this kind of binary is unsustainable nonsense, a simplification of what it is to be a person in the world. But the mode of argument here is to endlessly repeat the central point rather than complicate or deepen it.