Dr Trotter challenged Freud, asserting that ‘all human psychology … must be the psychology of associated man, since man as a solitary animal is unknown to us’. Herd instinct, whether protective, socialised or aggressive, was a positive human quality, tending towards altruism.

For Cees Nooteboom, the floating iceberg we call life is a moving-picture show going who knows where. The past is where the nourishment is. But does he really not feel at home in the present? No, that would be childish: it’s more a matter of discomfort with people who are happy to live only in the present.

In popular imagination, the Arts and Crafts movement is indelibly linked to well-known figures like William Morris, John Ruskin and Edward Burne-Jones. One could be forgiven for thinking women featured only as muses and models to celebrity artists and intellectuals.

Given the historical amnesia into which many of the individuals and their works have fallen, Katrina Goldstone’s account of the activity of Irish left-wing writers in the Thirties, the numbers involved and the energy they brought to their causes all constitute something of a revelation.

It was once possible to regard the judge Sergio Moro as a zealous, perhaps overzealous, prosecutor of corruption. That all changed when he agreed to serve in Brazil’s current far-right administration, a decision that has retrospectively tainted everything that went before.

In the first half of 1936 there were seventy political killings a month in Spain. This was really nothing new, rather the latest outbreak in a long war between ‘the ordered, timeless hierarchies’ of church, army and landowner and the urban proletariat and its peasant allies.

The internet was born around the same time as Roisin Kiberd herself. In ‘The Disconnect’, she traces its progress, from being ‑ just possibly ‑ an instrument for social good to its eventual emergence as just another way to make huge profits by exploiting our collective vulnerabilities.

Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was one of many Belgians to respond to an appeal from King Leopold to return to the country they had fled after its 1940 surrender and resume normal life. When the Allies landed in Normandy four years later some of them felt it wise to leave again.

People’s inability during the pandemic to behave morally and refrain from actions that threaten the common good has meant that in protecting the public states will have to rely more on law than persuasion. Legal enforcement is coming down the road ‑ as surely as it did with drink-driving.

From the four-poster to the settle bed, the dresser set with delph to the chair made from tree stumps, Irish country houses were filled with a variety of now unfamiliar artifacts, lowly things perhaps, but imbued in Claudia Kinmouth’s scholarly treatment with pungency and romance.

Later this year two new British channels will bring a decidedly right-wing flavour to the TV news sector in a move that will have implications for Ireland too. Both will target the BBC as ‘left-leaning’, employing a game plan that has been marinating for years in American news culture.

To be ‘a citizen of nowhere’, as nativist politicians sometimes like to smear city dwellers, is a nonsense. The very idea of citizenship grew out of cities and city states. The Londoners of Linda Grant’s ‘A Stranger City’ belong in a place and time, but they also know what it’s like to be told they don’t belong.

The terms ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ are not mutually exclusive, in the present or in the past. History matters and cannot be ignored. But in trying to shape a peaceful future for Ireland we should be aware of the danger of too much history, in particular a one-sided obsession with past wrongs.

In Danielle McLaughlin’s first novel brief moments of high drama intermingle with journeys into the complex, foggy territory of the past while a slow-burn reveal of several truths and satisfying introspection come together in layers to create a thought-provoking read.

Activists concerned to protect the oldest of all living Scottish languages have been wrongly accused of perpetrating a sort of nationalist essentialism. In fact Gaels are more likely to associate themselves with more than just one kind of Scottish identity than non-Gaels.

Geraldine Mitchell’s four collections have in part sprung from insights gleaned from a lifetime of covert observation and independently considered reflection, beginning at a very early age when she spied on adults, refusing to take their statements about the world at face value.

Megan Nolan’s debut novel, a refreshingly honest and often uncomfortable meditation on the relationship between desire, self-destruction and the female body, marks her out as one of the most daring and gifted writers of her generation.

Ekphrastic poems allow a poet to amplify and expand the meaning of the piece of art being viewed. Less common is the collection that is informed as a whole by one painter, creating an aural and an optical illusion that the depicted poet and poems exist in three dimensions.

In his new collection, Greg Delanty makes another valuable contribution to the poetry of environmental consciousness. His reflections on species of flora or fauna that are thriving, endangered, or extinct frame a political consideration of climate change and an ever more urgent call to action.

The pursuit of the common good, Pope Francis argues in a new book, needs societies to focus now on the urgent need for practical measures of fraternity with just as much determination as they have focused on equality and liberty since the late nineteenth century.

A history of Ireland’s main Catholic seminary has a much wider focus than the merely institutional and provides a fascinating account of the vibrant, sometimes unruly, throng of students and teachers that left their mark on Maynooth, as it undeniably left its mark on them.

Sylvia Plath presented an image to the world – brilliant student, stellar emerging poet and active, outdoor girl – while within she was deeply troubled and prone to the swings of a disabling depression. A sparkling new biography does full justice to both sides of Plath, and to her blazing art.

As a person, Patricia Highsmith was simply vile: mean, cruel, hard, unloving and unlovable. But was she a good writer? Graham Greene, JG Ballard and Gore Vidal all thought so. She was more esteemed in Europe than the US, where her cynicism about human relationships didn’t go down well.

In her second collection, Leeanne Quinn gives voice and presence to the Russian poets Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam. Like Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova, Quinn has experienced grief and loss; like them, she has an attraction for cemeteries.

Each past era, Maria Stepanova reminds us, has its own particular dust that settles in every corner. Those who conflate past with present or appropriate the memories of the dead for their own benefit move us further from the plains of memory and closer to the precipice of myth.

Many great novels, from ‘Lolita’ to ‘The Kindly Ones’, force our recognition through horror and disturbing conceptions of beauty we might seek to deny, but the proper defence of having written such works, the refutation of shallow moralistic attacks on them, is not the pained retort but the work itself.

In his posthumously published final collection, ‘Shadow of the Owl’, Matthew Sweeney employs the weapon of writing to cope with terminal illness. The book marks the moving and triumphant culmination of Sweeney’s unique brand of ‘imagistic narrative’ poetry.

Bipolar disorder has been explained as an attempt to create a world in which everything is either black or white. The illness can only be treated, it is suggested, when the important third element is introduced.

Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short spaces.

Those Germans who argue so vehemently against a so-called transfer union should realise that the EU has always been such a union. France got the CAP for its large rural economy and Germany the common market for its strong industry. Little has changed since.

DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind of opinionated prickliness when things are not what they seem to be or should be.

Unsentimental, sparing and unspecific, the painter Patrick Pye has sought figurative images to represent symbolically “the archetypes of our humanity” depicted in an alternative universe where expiation has been achieved.

A former minister for enterprise famously suggested that while Ireland was physically closer to Berlin it was spiritually, and economically, closer to Boston. As our neighbouring island prepares to push off into the North Atlantic, it is worth asking if this is still a tenable orientation for the state.

The following is an extract from Emer Nolan’s Five Irish Women: The second republic, 1960-2016, published this month by Manchester University Press.

The Irish in New York faced much of the same hostility from a Protestant establishment that wished to exclude them as they did at home. But eventually they came to belong, based on their service in the US army their role in maintaining law and order, their political skills, and, not least, their sheer numbers.

This fascinating miscellany comprises seventy-nine short pieces on marriage practices in Ireland over approximately 1,300 years. During this period the institution of marriage was organised around property, status, succession and, in the case of the elite, politics.

In Fred Johnston’s new collection the subject is the experience of cancer or suspected cancer. The prevailing mood is one of grim fatalism; there is no belief in the medical world doing good. This is a world without Ms Nightingales.

A history of the interactions between Ireland and Scotland over two millennia, told in a series of 120 episodes, ranges entertainingly from the Roman governor Agricola’s plan to invade Ireland from Scotland to 21^st century pitch invasions at Ibrox and Celtic Park.

The cultural absorption or lack of it of large immigrant communities may not have predictable outcomes. The relationship between culture and politics, it seems, is not straightforward and drawing political conclusions from cultural practices is an inexact business.

A new anthology of works of fiction translated into English is modest about its ambitions and disclaims any ambition to be ‘canonical’. Nevertheless it is a smartly executed work, which invites us to fill in some gaps in our literary education and ‘get out a bit more’.

Once independence was won, the question facing Irish ideologues and leaders was how to make revival real. It was then that the tenuous and tentative nature of the relation between the cultural and the political became clear. Those different spheres would never march in lockstep.

In Berlin, an old building is being repurposed for use as a computer store. In the middle of a bleak winter, the construction workers have inadequate time, inadequate resources, speak many different languages and have managers fresh from the Celtic Tiger building boom. Nothing can go wrong.

The indomitable Grace O’Malley, pirate queen, is the heroine of a new graphic novel that will entertain and inform children from nine years upwards.

Nano Nagle’s emphasis on educating the Catholic poor had a political dimension and contributed to the integration of the several parts of Catholic Ireland into a whole which had the potential of politically focusing the majority. In this sense it is not too fanciful to see her  work as prefiguring that of O’Connell.

A Ukrainian proverb can be taken to illustrate our human attraction – and perhaps our occasional uneasiness about that attraction – to alcohol, its pleasures and dangers. “The church is near,” it goes, “and the tavern is far. It is snowing heavily. I shall walk carefully.”

O’Connell’s Monster Meetings came to an abrupt halt in October 1843 when the Viceroy  mobilsed four battalions of troops, some four hundred armed RIC and Metropolitan Police and moved three gunships into Dublin Bay 

In a poem about O’Connell Street’s Spire, the monument becomes a dagger, a skewer, an extended middle finger. None of the names are inclusive of us, the citizens; the Spire is the ‘we’ reduced to ‘I’, which might be seen as the opposite of Boran’s project, to expand the ‘I’ to ‘we’.