Bernard O'Donoghue welcomes two new selections of Seamus Heaney's work, New Selected Poems 1966-1987 and New Selected Poems 1988-2013, complete with a two-disc recording, drawing on the two volumes, of the poet himself reading. His conclusion? "A marvellous way to read Heaney, especially when supplemented by the recordings. It was nearly half a century after his death before the authoritative Collecteds of Yeats began to appear. For Heaney, pending a Collected, these books are an eminently satisfying interim measure."
John McAuliffe's poetry column reviews The Zebra Stood in the Night by Kerry Hardie; Gerald Dawe's Mickey Finn's Air; Her Father's Daughter by Nessa O'Mahony; Theo Dorgan's Nine Bright Shiners; and Jessica Traynor's Liffey Swim, while we also publish two new poems by Jane Clarke.
John Fanning, former chairman of McConnell's advertising agency, finds Margaret Thatcher's right-hand ad man Tim Bell's memoirs "deliciously indiscreet, indisputedly in-the-know and indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary politics". Reviewing In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815, Richard Aldous says it is Jenny Uglow's mastery of characterisation that brings it superbly to life.
Was Adolf Eichmann a self-confident and ideologically driven young SS officer or an accommodating desk perpetrator of genocide? Robert Gerwarth review Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of A Mass Murderer, which seeks to connect the two.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne says Marina Warner, author of Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, "is to be commended for attempting to write a popular account of this most fascinating genre, but the work fails to deliver the promise of its own title". In Word for Word, Doireann Ní Bhriain champions the Irish language publishing scene.
Easter Widows, Sinéad McCoole's story of the women behind the men of 1916 is interesting if cluttered reading, argues Susan McKay.
Reviewing William Gibson's new novel, The Peripheral, Peter Murphy wrties: "There's a way of reading William Gibson's body of work as a 30-year project in which cyberspace replaces the acid trip, future-shock substitutes for the methamphetamine rush, and corporate paranoia is dope psychosis". Sarah Gilmartin says Nina Stibbe's debut novel Man at the Helm takes a bleak subject and turns it into a wonderfully entertaining read. I've read it too and I agree. Eileen Battersby finds The Mussolini Canal by Antonio Pennacchi, an Impac longlister, to be an earthy family epic, both larger than life and cheekily humorous.
