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At this point in his review, Eliot moves toward thinking that to make sense of Yeats you have first to remember that he is an Irishman. To be an Irishman, he thinks, is to be deprived of certain attributes of sensibility, notably of wit, a quality he defined in his essay on Andrew Marvell as featuring “a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace”.

O Death, you have taken Muircheartach from us, / far too late in everyone’s opinion; / snatch Tadhg quickly also to the graveyard, / those two should never be separated … / Hell is not punishment enough for him, / Muircheartach O’Griffin of the wily leaping.

However what was required was not direct political action so much as a change of consciousness in the minds of Italians. As such, Gobetti’s project was to be a long-term, gradual one which aimed to defeat fascism not for his own generation but for the following one. He cast himself as a modern-day heretic, revealing unpleasant truths about their history to a closed-minded, reactionary people who did not want to hear them.

O’Driscoll raises the matter of the many conferences, launches, conferrings and other public events in which Heaney participates. “Ongoing civic service, I suppose,” Heaney responds ... Life has been good to him in many ways; poetry has enriched his existence both privately and in the social and intellectual worlds it has opened up to him. In return, though under no obligation to roll up his shirtsleeves and take part in the meitheal, Heaney performs his neighbourly duty as few in his position would.

Chief among them is Mnemosyne Lay in Dust (1966), a book - length sequence which can be read as an autobiographical account of a breakdown and as a response to the chaotic and destructive emergence of the new state.These poems' grotesque humiliations and their refusals to mythologise their protagonists or console them with larger narratives of redemption should be seen to define post-Yeatsian Irish literature as much as Joyce or Beckett or McGahern.

Like Swift and Twain, Roth is aesthetically propelled by anger; it supplies the energy needed for the massive, self-imposed task of dissecting, novel after novel, the suffocating paradoxes of twentieth-century America. Like Lenny Bruce, Roth in his early work used rant as a way of exercising his vitality and crafting an obscenity-fuelled response to a bland, hypocritical national environment. As he’s matured, however, his anger has grown more complex, manipulated as carefully as the shifting voices and points of view that help make his prolific body of fiction both deeply tragic and rich in comic expression.

It is to literature we have to look to convey an experience for which there are no direct words, notably to its resources within tone and connotation. Heidegger, in the end, saw in poetry a better means than philosophy to express the experience of Being. And, for Existentialist philosopher Merleau-Ponty, philosophical language needs to become more literary if it is to convey something of the experience. Since there are no direct words for the experience, philosophy, for him, needs to proceed indirectly or obliquely.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin put paid to the Georgian and Regency styles and became the premier architect of the Gothic Revival. He designed one of the world’s most instantly recognisable landmarks, the clock tower popularly known as Big Ben. He can rightly be said to have changed the architectural face of Ireland too, his buildings being particularly common in Co Wexford.

His liberalisation of the laws regulating abortion, homosexuality and divorce followed an idiosyncratic individualism which Trudeau saw as the logical outcome of his Catholic faith. Like a certain strand among Catholics in the Victorian era, Trudeau’s liberalism grew out of a rejection of the doctrine of the Atonement, which proclaimed that the wages of sin is death and which meant to collect on that debt.

While some see the European Union as the only effective possible counterweight to “chaotic international networks and concentrations of power” others see it as another manifestation of globalisation, driven by a quasi-religious faith in the market, competition and privatisation. “This,” writes Mak, “is the philosophy of most political elites, but many citizens – even the majority in any number of European countries – don’t believe in it at all.”