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The banks made supernormal profits and knew that if they ever got into trouble the taxpayer would bail them out. This was a wonderfully easy way of making big money. There were hardly any risks involved as far as bank executives were concerned. Fraud may technically be a crime in this country but it is impossible to prove. It is like the modern theology of hell: it exists as a concept but no one actually goes there.

The claims long made in Irish Republican circles of a shoot-to-kill policy are vigorously denied. Andrew states categorically: “There is no evidence in Security Service files that it countenanced or assisted a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland.” But does this mean it didn’t happen? And what if it had happened? Might a researcher expect to find a file named “Ireland: Shoot-to-Kill Policy”?

The kaiser was a pioneer in the notion of using Turkey as a bridge between Europe and the Islamic world. The events chronicled in this book are not particularly encouraging, being more consistent with Dr Ian Paisley’s insight that the trouble with a bridge was that it went over to the other side.

Yeats’s interest in Berkeley developed in the 1920s in the context of his appointment to the Irish senate, where he saw himself as a spokesman for the old Protestant previously largely Unionist ascendancy caste. In this context he built up a mythological history of the Protestant ascendancy which bore as much resemblance to the original as his accounts of the Irish peasantry written in the late nineteenth century bore to the reality of the life of the rural poor.

It is important to distinguish the harms intrinsically connected to drug use from the many harms in addition to the creation of a lucrative criminal black market in drugs that are actually caused by prohibition. Prohibition-induced ignorance, confusion and rashness are lethal, as is prohibition’s blocking of an effective system of quality control. The latter is an ongoing disaster since most drug-related deaths are caused by contaminants in drugs or ignorance about the actual strength of doses bought on the black market.

Although Mrs Thatcher professes to have found Mr Haughey easier to deal with than Dr FitzGerald, at the time ... she had a high regard for his honesty of purpose and indeed (so it seemed to me) even a degree of personal affection for him. Although she found him unduly loquacious and tended to call him “Gareth” (“She seems to think I’m Welsh,” he observed ruefully), he was a man (like Gorbachev) she “could do business with”.

His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part, in the contemporary world, consuming books and encountering friends and lovers, but their dedication to art seems anachronistic, more of a piece with the romantics, surrealists, or beat poets.

Poland is making rapid strides in catching up on the West but there remain areas where there is still much progress to be made. For example, it is perfectly possible – accepted even – for twenty-eight-year-old footballers to have no published biographies. Biographies are much scarcer in Poland than in the English-speaking world and no one, it seems, is quite sure what the procedure is for dealing with delicate subjects.

The Celtic Tiger years have seen a generation of writers emerge that has found in history a way of thinking about the present. It is unsurprising that four of the most recent high-profile Irish novels produced – from Colum McCann, Colm Toibín, William Trevor and now Joseph O’Connor – are set in the past. Trapped in cycles of bad memories, these novels are excavations, or perhaps exorcisms. Divested of the radical potential of the best modernist art, Irish writing has become a mixture of quietist aesthetics and commercially driven diversion.

Then there is the certainty that Google will miss books, skip pages, blur images and make other errors, while there is no guarantee that its copies will last. Bits become degraded over time. Documents may get lost as hardware and software quickly become extinct. As Darnton points out, we have lost eighty per cent of all silent films and fifty per cent of all films made before World War II. The best preservation system ever invented, he adds, was the old-fashioned, pre-modern book.