The American Dream, by suggesting that upward social mobility is relatively straightforward and commonplace, was a kind of inversion of the noble lie in Plato’s ‘Republic’. The noble lie is required, Plato advises, because social mobility is so uncommon a phenomenon that people’s expectations need to be managed down. They need to be told that the elite is elite because the people who comprise it are innately fitted for the role and that that innateness is almost always passed down, from parent to child. The Dream, on the other hand, tells us we can all make it, but it’s very much down to us.

No aspect of Sinéad O’Connor’s world view has been more overlooked than her faith. Her belief in God remained strong through her life, and her relationship with Catholicism went much deeper than her decision to rip up her mother’s picture of the pope on television. In fact, much of her career can be understood as a mission to repurpose Catholicism in terms more suitable for the emerging, socially liberal Western order, one whose hegemony was not yet secure in 1985 in Ireland when she left for London.

Fearing arrest, Svitlana managed to flee the occupied zone, dressing up as a nurse and escaping in an ambulance. Her colleague Maria also managed to get out. She was only seventeen and told the Donetsk border checkpoint officers she was going to study in Warsaw. ‘You shouldn’t be studying in the West,’ the officers told her. ‘Haven’t you heard there are three genders there?’ Fortunately, they let her through.

I think if Thomas Mann were here today he would want to retain some high-minded beliefs and plead that not all high culture be deconstructed as manipulation in pursuit of power. But his great translator into English, Helen Lowe-Porter, thought him politically naive. She wrote to him: ‘I wondered if you do not move in too rarified an air … for the necessary ingredient of cynicism to find enough place in your political outlook.’ She added, in a letter to a friend in 1942: ‘He has such a good heart … I do wish he knew more.’

Knowledge does not fall from the sky. There are ‘hierarchies’ in terms of what counts as social scientific knowledge and who gets to produce it. Authors whose ‘identity’ is visible may be viewed as biased and parochial. Meanwhile, the floating, omniscient knowers of Anglo-American academia are free to write about anything, and to retain an objectivity that can unearth a universal truth.

Before Alexander, the Greeks occupied an area the size of New York state; after him, they controlled one the size of the United States. He stomped through Egypt, extinguished the Persian empire and struck deep into India and Central Asia. He founded some seventy cities, many of which he named after himself, then declared himself a god and binge-drank himself into an early mausoleum aged thirty-two.

Mrs Thatcher, who scarcely bothered to conceal her suspicion of nationalist motives, betrayed perhaps the greatest ignorance of Irish affairs. Most notoriously, she went so far as to canvass the idea that the border be redrawn to exclude majority Catholic areas and thereby relieve the British state ‘of the expense of paying social security to people who did not want to belong to the United Kingdom’.

At nineteen, Muriel Camberg blithely hitched herself to a man whom she’d met at a dance, Sydney Oswald Spark, with even his initials – SOS – failing to sound a proper warning note. She joined him in Southern Rhodesia, gave birth to a son and found herself living with a husband who was prone to severe psychotic episodes. From this predicament, she effected the first in a series of enterprising departures. 'I escaped for dear life,' as she was to put it later in a memoir of her early life .

Even if you accept the 1950s as the zenith of the nuclear family, the economic context was wildly different from our own, it being generally an age of government subsidy, wage growth, tighter corporation regulation, expansion of welfare and a housing market in which veterans in the US could put down a deposit of one American dollar for a house. Even under these extremely favourable conditions, which propelled the picket fence family to new cultural heights, only 60 per cent of working age women were housewives and one in three US marriages ended in divorce.

Joan Silber’s touch is light, but her subjects couldn’t be more weighty: love and sex, illness and death, money and happiness, betrayal and forgiveness. Her manipulation of fictive time and space is artfully simple yet magically deep and her books are always a sheer pleasure, her illusory artlessness and narrative prowess making her both easy to read and well worth revisiting. Her deftness and mastery have led Nick Hornby to call her a ‘guiding star’ to other writers.

For Colm Tóibín, as also for his poetic influences – Derek Mahon, Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn – a wish to be faithful to the self is both reflective of and in tension with a natural inhibition. They’re wary of insincerity and self-deception. But they’re also guarded, even evasive, especially about their losses and traumas. In more than one sense, they keep to themselves. This conflict between transparency and reserve, sincerity and remoteness, informs their plain, disciplined styles.

Robert Macfarlane, an internationally renowned and prolific writer on nature, has turned his attention to rivers. At Ennore Creek, in a poor district of Chennai in southern India, ‘the air is violent with pollution’, so dirty Macfarlane's group must wear face masks. When asked what the locals would like for the future, a woman replies: ‘We’re all getting cancer. It would be nice if we just got asthma.’ The river at this point is so chemically polluted that it blisters human skin.

The publishers are delighted to announce that Johnny Lyons has been appointed managing editor of the drb. The first number under his stewardship will be issue 160, Spring 2026. In response to his appointment, Johnny, who has a background in philosophy and business, said: ‘The drb has made an incalculable contribution to Irish intellectual life and I intend to continue in this tradition while attracting a new wave of contributors and readers to its pages.’ Click the heading to read a statement from Johnny.

Curtis Yarvin is sometimes referred to as ‘the court philosopher to the MAGA movement’. In his various publications and podcasts, Yarvin insists that all power in America should be centralised in the executive branch, led by a ‘monarchical president’ who rules above the legal system and the courts. Americans, he says, ‘are going to have to get over their dictator-phobia’. The universities must be closed down, because they produce the kind of knowledge that will destroy Western civilisation.

The most salient fact about Trump is not his cretinous authoritarianism or his venality or his narcissism or his degenerate verbal prose or his phobia of germs or his small hands or the fact that his psychopathic father never loved him. It is that he does not care or even think about anyone but himself. He is the ignorant culmination of America’s worst idea, individualism. This is the American variant of fascism, patented by Ayn Rand, perfected by Trump.

Equality, fairness, inherited wealth, class privilege and racial discrimination were all-consuming issues in postwar Britain. Atlee’s Labour government seemed to bring the chance to establish a socialist society of the kind that British intellectuals had been dreaming of for the previous fifty years and more. British public opinion was mostly repelled by the despotism prevailing in Soviet Russia and disgusted when the Russians invaded Hungary, but a moral question remained whether an egalitarian system was not superior in decency.

If Jesus was McDonald, a fellow with a great burger shack, St Paul was Ray Kroc, establishing the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing standardising directives to Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians and Thessalonians. He erected a warm and personal supernatural system to stand against the cold, impersonal natural system of science. Indeed the global franchise itself grew out of the war of faith against Greek science.

The ethnic makeup of this Indian ocean island is complex. The Zarabes are North Indian Muslims, the Zoreils are whites from metropolitan France, the Malabars are Hindu Tamils, the Yabs are poor whites, also known as ‘petits blancs’ while the rich families who own the coffee, nutmeg, vanilla and sugar plantations are the ‘gros blancs’. It’s not so much a melting-pot as a lasagne. The Swiftian narrator judges her birthplace harshly: 'a heap of rubble'.

The man appointed as secretary of state was William Whitelaw, whose gentlemanly and sometimes bumbling manner concealed a sharp political brain. In summer 1972 he made an abortive attempt to negotiate secretly with the IRA. The talks produced no progress, and a brief IRA ceasefire ended. Irish officials reported that John Hume told them that ‘at the request of the IRA … an internee, Mr Adams, had been released from Long Kesh today’.

The signature Norman work of asset-grabbing was completed within a generation of the Battle of Hastings, when England was effectively controlled by around 250 people. Beneath the top tier were about 2,000 landed knights and beneath them around 8,000 new settlers, not all of them especially powerful. In all, about 10,000 Normans came to Britain around the time of the conquest. Ireland’s land records were lost to fire in 1305, but they would have shown that the top Norman tier here numbered about 25 people.

One of the most interesting issues that arose while Altman was on the council was the visit of King Edward VII to Dublin, an episode that is central to the story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. The matter was highly contentious. A unionist member declared that his majesty deserved ‘a right hearty and true Irish welcome’ but Altman, consistent with his nationalist politics, voted against presenting an address of welcome.

I was intrigued by the fact that Tom Dunne cited the French Renaissance humanist Montaigne as an influence on his thinking and on the composition of ‘The Good Boy’. I cannot recall any great enthusiasm for Montaigne when as students we read a slim selection of the 'Essais' at UCC. But as Tom notes, certain writers reveal themselves more fully to readers of a certain age.

Trump was widely regarded as an incorrigible self-publicist, 'a tabloid joke' whose career had been marked by successive scandals and bankruptcies. I made a film about him for the BBC and I can recall how familiar and preoccupied he seemed to be with the world of TV entertainment – often citing popular programmes and commenting critically on their stars.

When did Mondrian start wearing glasses? I’d quite like to know. Yet strangely for a biography of a painter, especially a biography of this painter, about whom we learn that as a child he refrained from all play out of a paranoid fear of injuring his eyes, there is scant information, no information in fact, about the condition of his eyesight.

Alexandra Kollontai, a leading revolutionary who was on the central committee of the Bolshevik party, married twice and had a succession of lovers. In her autobiography she titled herself, ‘A Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman’. However, her concept of sexual emancipation appalled Lenin, who accused her of promulgating what he called 'the glass of water theory'. This arose after she was alleged to have said that ‘the sex act should be viewed as equivalent to drinking a glass of water’. In fact this is not an accurate account of what she said.