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.

Warsaw, doomed to disappear, became an invincible city, and the history of Poland is proudly cemented into its cityscape today. Even under communism, this reconstructed city of Russian merchants and royal pomp provided many people with a new start, including those formerly excluded from participation in urban life. Besides this shaping of social identity, it created new standards of reconstruction and preservation.

The rise in the power of the national state since the end of the seventeenth century, and the decline in the ability of feudal adventurers to create mayhem and misery by waging warfare in their own interests, created the necessary conditions for a great deal of social and human progress. The spiralling wealth of private companies and their political ambitions now seriously threaten our ability to defend ourselves and to implement the kind of international co-operation between states that is vital for our survival.

In some respects the Palestinian situation now is nearer to that of the Kurds than to that of most decolonising societies. How can a society of this kind achieve self-determination? The task would already be enormous were the Israeli state the only obstacle to Palestinian self-determination. But when that state enjoys so much US and EU backing, including downright impunity as the constant expansion of illegal settlements since 1967 shows, the enormity of the challenge can be grasped.

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.