Two seventeenth century siblings from north Donegal are said to have become, through an odd set of circumstances, ministers of rival religions, one an Anglican minister the other a Franciscan friar. The story is thought to be the source of the Gaelic lament ‘Fil, fil, aroon’.

Seamus O'Mahony, a gastroenterologist based in Cork, is one of the most prolific of contributors to this review. His well-received study of the medicalisation of death has just been published in paperback.

Journalists, according to Frederic Raphael, are the short order chefs of the writing world. With the great Joseph Roth you got more than wedges and coleslaw.

In July 1941 more than 340 Jews were beaten, humiliated and then murdered in Jedwabne in Poland by a large group of local men. Shortly afterwards the wife of one of the killers turned up to Mass wearing a fur coat that had only recently been worn to a synagogue.

The great French socialist leader Leon Blum was much hated by the extreme right in the 1930s, and largely because he was Jewish. It should also however be remembered that he was much hated by the extreme left.

Saul Bellow was not the first, but he was one of the earlier and most dominant of the Jewish writers who played such a big part in 20th-century American literature.

The desire to obliterate the useless past can be found in various forms, from smashing 'superstitious' statues and images to wishing to ban 'fairy tales' from the classroom.

Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe is back in a new novel, Let Me Be Frank with You. The only thing John Banville doesn't like is the title.

Colm Toibin's new novel, Nora Webster, has been garnering some very high praise from the critics.

A new book celebrates the seasons. But tell me again, how many of them are there?

New Labour and others enthusiastically embraced a model of society which relegated many people to the margins while embracing and celebrating the buccaneer virtues. We have seen where that got us. Is it too late for the left to think again?

Adam Thirlwell wishes us to contemplate the writer as great soul, cast out of bourgeois society for his compulsion for truth-telling. But the examples he chooses seem a little strange.

Doing good is all very well, but best to keep it to one's self. Being good is a more slippery matter still, and the good man often shares a bed with the bad one.

The English know that nothing is really ever going to change, so, well, you have to larf, innit? But they are missing out on the far superior feelings of satisfaction and self-righteousness to be gleaned from denunciation.

Germany, like Britain, is seeing the publication of a slew of books on the hundredth anniversary of the Great War.

There are 100,000 fewer librarians in the United States than there were twenty years ago. And in Ireland we are planning to open libraries with no staff. Oh brave new world!

A new book by David Runciman argues that democracies are superior to autocracies when it comes to riding out crises. Perhaps, but are they any longer fully democratic?

Jeanette Winterson makes a plea for the autonomy of the imagination and the role of the non-rational in explaining to us who we are.

A new book examines some of the interesting and obscure corners of punctuation and typography and the strange characters that once lurked about.

Ian Jack reviews a new book by Jeremy Paxman about the First World War, a conflict which Paxman insists was not futile or pointless.