Translating Ovid, Virgil, Homer and Sophocles has accompanied Irish literature’s shift to an increasingly global outlook

Sinéad Gleeson on the former Slits guitarist’s excavation of the lives of her parents

The former FBI director doesn’t his mince words about President Trump

Donal Ryan can blow attractive life into a character no matter how compromised, mean or dreary

Shaun Walker charts Putin’s mission to fill the Soviet void; Michel Eltchaninoff traces Putinism

Ed O’Loughlin on Alexis Okeowo’s account of ordinary Africans fighting extremism

John Boyne on a novel of family life, exile and conflict between siblings

Roy Foster and others show the humanities’ role in urgent contemporary debate

Parts of this series are original and provocative. Others are missed opportunities

Fintan O’Toole on Christopher Fitz-Simon’s edition of the great theatre director’s delightfully lively letters

An inventive debut about the conflicting impulses of smart millennial women

Mary Beard looks for the roots of women’s exclusion from decisionmaking

Maya Jasanoff views Conrad’s troubled life through the lenses of his four greatest novels

Breandán Mac Suibhne offers an extraordinary, provocative view of rural Ireland

Peter Fallon was wary of taking on the Greek poet Hesiod. He shouldn’t have been

The ITV political editor’s enlightened Keynesianism comes wrapped in Alan Partridgism

After Ireland review:Fintan O’Toole on a witty, engaging but sometimes baffling take on literature since 1945

George Saunders’s first novel focuses on the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie. Despite its highly original conceit it’s his most straightforward fiction

Susan McKay on Martin Dillon’s memoir of his life and journalism

Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe on an IMF insider’s analysis of all that went wrong