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Dorothy Macardle was a friend of de Valera, an historian of the idea of the Irish Republic and a novelist. Her story ‘The Uninvited’, memorably filmed in 1944 with Ray Milland, is a haunted house tale set in Cornwall but with Irish undertones. It is reprinted this month.

The lives of the Catholic nationalist community in the North, but also its wider migrations and fate in the fledgling new Irish Free State and in Britain, North America and further afield is a fascinating history of adaptation and adoption as much as restlessness and disaffection.

Mervyn Wall’s satires are in a playful and sometimes whimsical tradition which resists the uplift of the gods and heroes phase of the Irish revival and which includes many of the works of James Stephens and, at a pinch, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and The Poor Mouth.

An English rendering of a classic modernist Irish novel has found a translator who can do justice to its playfulness, delight in puns, neologisms, scurrilities and malapropisms and its ability to create and sustain a coherent world through rolling floods of words.

Sinéad Morrissey has written of how she learned from the Welsh poet RS Thomas how to ignore, when necessary, a hostile environment and the play of literary fashions: half the battle is knowing what not to listen to.

Some old familiars are to be encountered in a historical geography of Donegal, but it is more surprising what is not encountered.

In 1974 the Limerick poet Michael Hartnett announced from the stage of a Dublin theatre that he would no longer write in English, a decision which, he informed the audience, gave him somewhere to stand.

Sherman Alexie writes of the lives of Washington state’s native Americans, who frequently do not feel quite at home either in Seattle or in the Indian reservations where many of them have roots.

There are stirrings in Ulster Loyalist groupings which may, if they mature, disprove the old cliché that Northern Protestants have no culture other than the Orange Order and Rangers football club.

A historical novel based on a fourteenth century Hiberno-Norman chieftain reminds us that Ireland was a multilingual and multicultural country long before any of us were born.