Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams: Moderate to good, occasionally great
The occasional misfires in this collection are easy to overlook amid so many delightfully comic stories executed with precision and care
By Doug Battersby
Irish First Ladies and First Gentlemen, 1919-2011 by Bernadette Whelan: All the presidents’ spouses
Ireland out of England: The learned forgetting and remembering of a unionist Brexiteer
Anne Applebaum: ‘Trump is a transactional person whose interest is in himself... It’s why he is more dangerous’
Michael Longley: ‘Most men don’t like intelligent women. I just hang on their every word’
‘Every great man has a woman behind him rolling her eyes’
Identity by John Sweetman: a good cop comes clean
Poem of the Week: Mariners by Michael Longley
Night of Power by Robert Fisk: A masterly work by a unique and gifted ‘historian of the present’
By Conor O’Clery
Cross by Austin Duffy: A high-wire act pulled off with almost complete success
By James Conor Patterson
West Cork History Festival 2024: The festival has established a reputation for the quality of its programme
By Simon Kingston
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Following up Fleishman Is in Trouble was never going to be easy
By Edel Coffey
Best crime fiction: Witness 8 is a welcome addition to Steve Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn series
By Brian Cliff & Elizabeth Mannion