The claims long made in Irish Republican circles of a shoot-to-kill policy are vigorously denied. Andrew states categorically: “There is no evidence in Security Service files that it countenanced or assisted a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland.” But does this mean it didn’t happen? And what if it had happened? Might a researcher expect to find a file named “Ireland: Shoot-to-Kill Policy”?

Just as the exiled Joyce carried his own flawed Ireland into exile with him and had then to devise his own means for imaginatively reinventing it, so O’Doherty carried with him an Ireland and found in the then radical movements of minimalist and conceptual art in New York his own forms for expressing elements of his originating world. As his alter ego William Maginn says in The Deposition, “home isn’t where the heart is, it’s where you understand the sons of bitches”.

Clearly these iconic books resulted from intervention on the part of outsiders, who convinced islanders they had something of importance to say. This was consonant with the ideals of cultural romantic nationalism, whose impulse to recognise the richness and depth of the vernacular culture of the “people”, and the Irish-speaking people above all, achieved material expression in these works.

Post-Good Friday Agreement rhetoric about the historic “symbiotic bond” between Ireland and England presupposes that both parties were equal beneficiaries of this supposed symbiosis and can lead imperceptibly to a blurring of the conflict, violence, trauma and catastrophe involved in this long relationship.

Murphy shows little interest in or awareness of previous studies of the social context of the revolution, accepts the reality of the probably imaginary “Cairo Gang”, and utterly misrepresents the level of confidence of IRA leaders at the time of the truce. Far from “almost universally” claiming “that victory had been snatched from their grasp by the Truce”, leaders such as Collins, Mulcahy and MacEoin all emphasised the extreme military weakness of the organisation when contributing to the Treaty debates.

Emily’s self-seclusion was in the family tradition, as was her feeling of superiority, which she expressed in her inimitable manner. At a dinner during her visit to Boston, when presented with a flambé dessert she enquired from the judge sitting beside her, with characteristic poise, whether it was permissible in the capital of Unitarianism to eat hell fire. First published Spring 2011

American culture tends to reflect the various ways in which striving thrives. It’s not really so surprising, then, that rather than the novel of manners, à la James, American literature has produced the novel of bad manners. And the crime novel, in its modern form an American invention, is the last word in bad manners.

The kaiser was a pioneer in the notion of using Turkey as a bridge between Europe and the Islamic world. The events chronicled in this book are not particularly encouraging, being more consistent with Dr Ian Paisley’s insight that the trouble with a bridge was that it went over to the other side.

The banks made supernormal profits and knew that if they ever got into trouble the taxpayer would bail them out. This was a wonderfully easy way of making big money. There were hardly any risks involved as far as bank executives were concerned. Fraud may technically be a crime in this country but it is impossible to prove. It is like the modern theology of hell: it exists as a concept but no one actually goes there.

As a child, Czesław Miłosz wrote, 'I was primarily a discoverer of the world, not as pain but as beauty ... Happiness experienced in boyhood does not disappear without a trace.'

Yeats’s interest in Berkeley developed in the 1920s in the context of his appointment to the Irish senate, where he saw himself as a spokesman for the old Protestant   previously largely Unionist   ascendancy caste. In this context he built up a mythological history of the Protestant ascendancy which bore as much resemblance to the original as his accounts of the Irish peasantry written in the late nineteenth century bore to the reality of the life of the rural poor.

The memory of Robert Emmet would remain venerated in the James family - Henry James Snr was adept at reciting the speech from the dock. But his novelist son had little sympathy for Ireland. When his sister’s diary was printed two years after her death, he remarked how the years which Alice spent in England had revealed her to be “really an Irishwoman! … in spite of her so much larger and finer than Irish intelligence”.