Gilburd places this period, widely known as “the Thaw” in the context of other phases of attempted Westernisation in Russia, notably that which is associated with Peter the Great. And she illustrates how Russians made sense of all this new material by invoking the notion of “translation” – “a mechanism of transfer, a process of domestication, and a metaphor for the ways cultures interact”.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was what is sometimes called – and indeed he is called it on the dust jacket of this book – a “controversial” figure. A First World War hero who was wounded seven times, he was undoubtedly uncommonly brave. He also insisted that those who were less brave should play their part, forcing retreating soldiers to join his unit at gunpoint. 

The hostility to Northerners believed to be on the harder end of the spectrum could even, on occasion, achieve the near impossible, making Northern Catholics wonder if they might have more in common with Northern Protestants than with Southerners. 

Joan Wallace Scott, the author of Knowledge, Power and Academic Freedom, sets out to offer an account of the attacks on academic freedom in the United States. She is a historian and one committed to the principle that academic freedom supports the common good. She tells a story of interference in the curriculum by wealthy donors, the political vetting of teachers and online denunciations of individual lecturers as a growing and corrosive phenomenon

The individuals who settled this region were not “rugged individuals” but rather committed members of communities whose hallmark was their religion. These communities “understood and shaped their world through the preaching and study of scripture, recitation ... and regular ritual performance”.

What of the young ‘Tans’, the victorious and often decorated survivors of the Great War? Now they found themselves fighting a vicious, doomed campaign within their own country, yet in a foreign land where they could trust no one and were despised. Sharing a lonely, fierce comradeship, they felt these deaths with the sting of betrayal and with a rage that was driven against other men, other families, other victims.

Some may find it difficult to share Peter Hart’s emotional sympathy with that collection of thugs.

“Such a shame, she was a good old stick” was George Orwell’s reaction, as reported by one acquaintance, shortly after he had learned of the death of his wife during what was supposed to have been a fairly minor operation. If we are charitable we will take this as a classic example of English understatement and stiff upper lip. Whatever the case, Orwell was soon on the hunt again.

Galavan focuses on the larger Victorian houses of Rathgar, Ballsbridge and Dun Laoghaire, but her scholarship and insights apply throughout Victorian Dublin. Her book celebrates the progress which saw a departure from the tight “cliff like” Georgian buildings erected close to the street, and typical of places like Merrion Square, to the garden suburbs with their red brick interspersed with coloured layers, their bay windows and overtly ornamental features.

Like many good poets, Amanda Bell is exact in her language but she is also a poet with a particular touch and feeling for words which makes her work distinctive and entirely her own.

Estonia passed from Swedish into Russian hands in the early eighteenth century. Peter the Great’s field marshal Boris Sheremetev wrote to him in 1709 boasting that not a cock crowed between Lake Peipsi and the Gulf of Riga, so complete had been his destruction. The population of Estonia in 1712 is estimated to have been well under half what it was twenty years earlier, as a result of first famine and then war. Under Russian rule, the country remained under the dominance of the large Baltic-German landowners, who had no problem about serving the imperial state.

The Maamtrasna Murders provides a cultural history of the events and subsequent impact of the renowned Maamtrasna murders from the perspective of language change in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Professor Kelleher takes the Maamtrasna case - one that is notorious for its failure to provide interpretation and translation services for monoglot Irish speakers - and examines broader sociolinguistic issues, moving Maamtrasna's violation of human rights from a local to a global stage.

Cathal Brugha was a figure of central importance to the Irish Revolution and despite this, he is almost totally neglected in the history of this period. This is the first dedicated English-language biography to focus on this fascinating figure. Using new archival material from the Bureau of Military History, Fergus O'Farrell documents Brugha's career as a revolutionary. This closely-researched work examines Brugha's complex attitudes to violence as well as illuminating his commitment to political methods.

This collection of essays makes a timely and important contribution to both Irish and Jewish studies.

"John Hewitt’s A North Light: Twenty-five years in a Municipal Art Gallery  shows he was a much-travelled, well-read, enthusiastic art lover with an independent spirit and sense of dissent." Extract from Gerald Dawe’s The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing is published by Irish Academic Press.

"John Hewitt’s A North Light: Twenty-five years in a Municipal Art Gallery  shows he was a much-travelled, well-read, enthusiastic art lover with an independent spirit and sense of dissent." Extract from Gerald Dawe’s The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing is published by Irish Academic Press.

"John Hewitt’s A North Light: Twenty-five years in a Municipal Art Gallery  shows he was a much-travelled, well-read, enthusiastic art lover with an independent spirit and sense of dissent." Extract from Gerald Dawe’s The Wrong Country: Essays on Modern Irish Writing is published by Irish Academic Press.

Acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end.