A new study of John McGahern is grounded in a capacious knowledge of his fiction, his reading, his manuscripts and notes, and other critics’ work. It will allow us to assess his enduring reputation fifty years after the career began and a decade after its end.

Iris Murdoch’s Easter 1916 novel ‘The Red and the Green’ (1965) expresses some of her own early Marxist and feminist attitudes, as when a character asserts that ‘being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same’.

The outlook after the COP21 summit is certainly better than after Copenhagen in 2009. But there is still a mismatch between the EU’s declaration of climate leadership and the resources it devotes to exercising that with the huge states of China and India.

A new biography of Marcel Proust which appears as part of a series called ‘Jewish Lives’ fails to tell us very much about its subject and does not seem to be on safe ground either with the linguistic, historical or cultural background.