Nonetheless, as letter after letter testifies, for Beckett “the essential doesn’t change” and a deeply ingrained pessimism, tempered by sympathy and loyalty, pervades these pages, as one would perhaps expect it to.

An inspiring new collection of essays by a doctor and literary scholar affirms Beckett’s intuition that it is ‘the occasional glimpse’ of mutual recognition ‘by us in them and ... by them in us of that smile at the human condition’ which makes it worthwhile to go on.

With the death of Richard Murphy on January 30th, 2018, Ireland lost one of its greatest poets, the creator, in the words of fellow practitioner Peter Sirr, of ‘unforgettable music’.

Richard Murphy felt out of place in American universities, where his students equated poetry with self-expression. As Gerald Dawe has recently suggested, Murphy was always a poet of other people, whose poems are not about himself at all but about ‘others’ and their reality.

Pajtim Statovci’s second novel is a book in which civilisation itself is under threat and in many respects the heart of Tirana is a heart of darkness; the Albanian capital, a city that nowadays is a pleasure to visit, was, in the 1990s, a dangerous, degraded and desperate place.