Having commenced the summer holday reading with Ronan McGreevy’s Great Hatred:The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP, I am now halfway through Diarmaid Ferriter’s Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War.

Looking for an escape from 1922, I turned to James Joyce and picked up Dubliners. My most recent copy of Ulysses sat next to it on the shelf.

It seemed odd to reflect that the imaginings of the strange mind of James Joyce can command a readership around the world, yet the hideous story of …

This morning, I lent my copy of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count to a colleague. It is a brilliant piece of polemic against the antisemitism of supposedly progressive groups (antisemitism from elsewhere has tended to be a given).

Once, in school, we tried to understand this strangest of prejudices.

‘Mr Poulton, why did people hate the Jews?’

We had been looking at the history of the Bible and the question arose as we thought about the heritage of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The normally noisy class sat attentive.

‘Antisemitism goes back …

It is the bicentenary of the birth of George Stoneman this year. Why do I remember the name of an American Civil war general? Because  of The Band’s song, The Night they drove old Dixie down.

Why has a song about events long past retained the capacity to capture the imagination. Why would the American Civil War still have cultural relevancy?

It is an odd song, in some ways, a tale told from the perspective of one who fought for the Confederacy, one who might have been regarded in a …