The most dispiriting aspect of our economic crisis five years on has been the absence of the political courage needed to implement the radical political, economic and administrative reforms that would make Ireland competitive in the way that other small open European economies are competitive.

Henry James’s great novel, with its melding of the social and psychological aspects of character, represented a broad bridge connecting the societal narratives mastered by Austen, Dickens and Eliot and the Modernist canon of the twentieth century.

Like another smart New Jersey Jewish boy, Philip Roth, Paul Auster has rendered the texture of American life through reportage, but he is somewhat set apart from the Jewish-American literary milieu by the influence of Beckett and the French poetic and philosophical traditions that gripped him as a young man.

Imagination, determination and an ability to exploit the commercial attractiveness to the consumer of the authentic and traditional have enabled many successful businesses to be created and sustained in peripheral locations in Ireland. Perhaps there is more than one viable model for industrial development.

In 1974 the Limerick poet Michael Hartnett announced from the stage of a Dublin theatre that he would no longer write in English, a decision which, he informed the audience, gave him somewhere to stand.

A superb and beautifully written study of the sixteenth century Council of Trent, when the Catholic church gathered to consider its response to Protestantism, constitutes a painless crash course on the Europe of the time.

The Innti generation of Irish-language writers recast poetry for a new generation of urban dwellers and imbued it with the revolutionary and liberating sentiments of the time.

As Wasps and similar types decline as a percentage of the US population, things don’t look great for the Republican party. But its creation of safe seats through gerrymandering has facilitated a takeover by extremists, against whom the traditional ‘country club’ moderates seem to be helpless.