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.

I liked John Montague immediately, for the exemplary quality of his poems but also for his endearing, mischievous, cosmopolitan personality. He was a breath of fresh air in Cork, then a rather narrow provincial city, bringing welcome intimations of a wider world which he was happy to share with a small coterie of young poets taking their first tentative steps into a world where he was already an established figure.

Over the years, Yarvin’s radicalisation has developed into something akin to what 1930s English and German fascism would look like if filtered through a mesh of Internet memes marinated in 4chan. Yarvinism adopts the communication style of the post-modern, Internet era: multiple layers of irony, active conceptual contradictions, provocative statements issued then withdrawn with a knowing wink, then reissued with a slightly different phrasing – and underpinning it all, a kind of rustic sadism.

Andrea believes her mother put her personal happiness, in her relationship with Fremlin, above her loyalty to her. She failed as a mother. When Andrea finally told her about the abuse, in 1992, Alice Munro seemed more upset by Fremlin’s betrayal of her than by the damage caused to her daughter. Andrea Munro accuses her mother of protecting her abuser. She does not accuse her of having been complicit in the abuse, since she knew nothing about it until sixteen years after it occurred, by which time Andrea was an adult in her mid-twenties. (Fremlin ceased to have any sexual interest in her after she reached puberty.)

Describing this sickness affecting society and particularly the academy as ‘a posture of suspicion’ that dismisses reason as controlling hubris, freedom as domination and liberal democracy as an ally of imperialism, Richard Bourke regards the phenomenon as culturally noxious and intellectually unfounded, since it denies the genuine and hard-won accomplishments of human history. Hegel, he asserts, is the first thinker to help us to see through the spuriousness of this kind of wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values.

Munster v Leinster isn’t just a rugby match: there’s more at stake than victory after 80 minutes or bragging rights until the next time. Limerick is, after all, the one place in Ireland where rugby is working class, while Leinster stands in not just for the decadent snobbery of Dublin but where Irish rugby comes from: gentleman amateurs at Trinity College in the 1850s juiced up on muscular Christianity from British public schools.

David Peace’s novel about the ‘Busby Babes’ is situated in a world sharply different from our own. In 1958 professional footballers received a maximum weekly wage of £20, £5 above the average industrial wage, and were bound by restrictive contracts that effectively made them indentured servants. Young unmarried players lived with their parents or in digs and took the bus to training.

As the millennials might put it, the world is falling apart and that’s been very hard on me. But I don’t mean to mock. We live in an age of anxiety. Indeed, we’ve been living in such an age since 1789 – those of us, at any rate, who have been lucky enough not to find ourselves on tumbrils or in war zones or killing fields. We have horror to help us think about this anxiety – horror, the genre that tells us we are right to be scared.

Orwell’s sense of writerly inadequacy on reading ‘Ulysses’ may have been what pushed him away from the naturalistic novel, at which he was unremarkable, to political writing, where he was, from the start, an assured and distinctive voice who eventually ‘managed to colonise the mental world both of his own age and the ones that followed’.

Irish writers engaged passionately with the cause of Republican Spain at a time when conservative Catholic Ireland strongly favoured Franco. There were mass demonstrations in support of the Spanish church and the rebel forces. The largest of these gatherings, organised by a right-wing organisation called the Irish Christian Front, was 60,000-strong.

The traditional English murder mystery was set in an idealised pre-war society where vicars came to tea and jolly girls played tennis and the class hierarchy was firmly in place. The murder was solved by an all-seeing genius who laid everything on the line in the final dramatic scene. But there is another model, in which crimes are solved collectively for the common good.

One reason outsiders failed to appreciate the level of antisemitism is that Jewish leaders downplayed it. Rabbi Herzog denied in 1946 that he had found any antisemitism either in Ireland or Britain. But his own son, the future president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, recalled of his Dublin childhood: ‘Many times we [Jewish children] were stoned in the streets by urchins, many times. This was quite normal at the time.’

During World War Two, there were rumours of some air raid shelters operating on a Catholic-only or Protestant-only basis. In 1958 Catholic archbishop John Heenan was stoned while visiting a sick woman in a Protestant area; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to council seats, albeit for the last time.

The denial of autonomy to women in the Greek city was related to their absence from the field of war. In poetry some men dreamed of a world where they could bear their own children. As they could not, women were expected to have male offspring, who would grow up to fight and debate in the polis. But Euripides’s Medea said, ‘I would rather stand behind a shield in three battles than give birth to a single child.'

Raphael Samuel and EP Thompson sought to resurrect the lives of the marginalised, in Thompson’s case the weavers and artisans, in Samuel’s itinerant labourers, gypsies, rough sleepers and travelling showmen. But such a neo-Romantic, even populist, approach was to clash with the more ‘scientific’ preoccupations of Marxist intellectuals like Perry Anderson, who was to engage in a bruising polemic with Thompson.