Finishing a novel for Colum McCann feels like finishing a PhD. He upends the traditional maxim to “write what you know” in favour of writing “what you want to know”.

Orwell got it wrong. It is not governments but banks, insurance companies, pension funds and low-cost airlines, the raucous cheerleaders of deregulation, that oppress and stupefy us with a network of small and baffling rules.

Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution have weathered well and he cannot be held responsible for those who have developed a repugnant politics on the back of a vulgarisation of them.

Roger Casement dared to dream and turned out to be a nation-builder, regardless of the foolish attempts of his more enthusiastic supporters to deny the reality of his sexual nature. If that was accepted, his stature would rise.

The Profumo Affair helped defeat a government and usher England into the Swinging Sixties. But the villains of the piece were not the politicians or the young women whose names became famous but the sleazy and prurient popular press.

James Plunkett’s classic novel reminds us of a society in which the poorest lived in the most appalling and hopeless conditions and the middle and upper classes were barely conscious of their existence.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was careless of the fate of his poems, treated his muse like a slut and her children as an unwanted and vaguely sinful burden.

Writing in 1906, the man who would later be one of the leaders of the Easter Rising envisaged a future one hundred years hence in which Ireland would have made enormous strides and English would be taught in schools only in Belfast and Rathmines.

Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller looked with the eyes of the victim on the political masters of terror and called it by its name.

The year is 1937 and the place Moscow, one of the key settings in European history and a fault line in the history of civilisation.

The most recent translation of WG Sebald’s work offers the expected pleasure of his engaging prose style and an introduction to the world of some intriguing German writers.

Joyce’s funny, moving and infuriating masterpiece should send us, not into the cold and sterile embrace of the examination room, but out again into the warm and throbbing world.

The Italian critic and editor Roberto Calasso enjoys a considerable reputation among the literary-critical elite, but how much substance or originality is there in his anti-rational musings?

Edna O’Brien’s memoir refuses to satisfy our curiosity or submit to the demands for interpretation. She has fought others’ desire for control from childhood, and in her eighties is still fighting.

DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind of opinionated prickliness when things are not what they seem to be or should be.

Unsentimental, sparing and unspecific, the painter Patrick Pye has sought figurative images to represent symbolically “the archetypes of our humanity” depicted in an alternative universe where expiation has been achieved.

Sebastião Salgado’s latest book of photographs represents nature more as a New Age dream of harmony rather than the random mayhem and violent contingency it actually is.

A new collection casts further light on the clergyman-poet RS Thomas and his two great subjects, God and Wales.

In an age when martyrdom is demonised and tagged with notions of fanaticism and people are reluctant to protest for a cause let alone die for one, 1916 presents an easy target.

All is very far from what it seems in a literary mystery novel by poet Ciaran Carson set in Belfast and Paris.

Lyrics have been defined as short poems written to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, but should Paul Muldoon’s lyrics be judged primarily as poems or as songs?

Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the most respected of twentieth century historians, still manages to impress from beyond the grave with a wide-ranging tour of culture and society.

Before the inexorable advance of the conifer, the picking of wild berries on Irish hillsides often provided a welcome seasonal boost in income for poorer rural families.

In April 1847 a vessel departed from Charlestown naval yard with eight hundred tons of relief supplies for the people of the city and county of Cork, paid for by the people of Boston and other towns in Massachusetts.

The teaching of science was often a difficult matter in Irish Catholic educational institutions and respected thinkers could sometimes be met by flawed, incoherent and ignorant polemic.

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.

An anthology of the most important Dáil debates of the last sixty years covers vital economic matters, Northern Ireland and the nation’s ongoing difficulties with matters of sexual morality and their consequences.

Dave Eggers’s beautifully written new novel offers a melancholy and dreamlike portrait of America in decline.

Jeanette Winterson regards AM Homes's new work as the greatest American novel of our time. Be that as it may, she is very good and very very funny.

Peter Hollywood's collection of stories is written in clear and elegant prose shot through with a wry humour.

This book examines how the Celtic Tiger, a high growth economy, fell into a macroeconomic abyss. Throughout the book attention is devoted to who and what was responsible for the crisis and looks at what could have been done to avoid the bailout.

This book presents an informative account of all of Machiavelli's writings and handles them with suppleness and authority, revealing deep connections between his thought and the vicissitudes of his career during a colourful and turbulent period.

Calvino liked to present an inscrutable face to the world, but this collection of letters shows him  to have been gregarious, puckish, funny, combative and, above all, wonderful company.

A wry and wise memoir of a unique career, just as distinctive as Tracey Horn's singing voice.

John Dennehy explores the profound political, economic, military and social impact of the Great war on one Irish  county - Tipperary.

This book is the first full length study of the royal manors of Crumlin, Esker, Saggart and Newcastle Lyons - all in south Dublin - in the period 1170-1400.

Gabriel Fitzmaurice brings us a charming a poignant retrospective on his life through new and selected sonnets.

Ross Skelton's memoir has impressed Roddy Doyle who says: "we read as if memory is being assembled in front of us. That precision, the beautifully executed detail makes Eden Halt a deeply moving memoir"

The Bourgeoisie, wrote Heinrich Heine in 1842, was "obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster",an "instinctive dread of communism" sapped bourgeois committment to liberal freedoms. Theirs was a "politics motivated by fear".Over the next 150 years the middle classes were condemned by the left as betrayers of liberty.This book uncovers this remarkable story including the new crusading demand for universal bourgeois liberties which has grown with the collapse of  communism.

The city of Cork experienced a political odyssey between Easter 1916 and the end of 1918. Irish Republicans evolved from a marginalised group to become undisputed political masters. The First World war created the context for this political transformation in Ireland's third- largest city.