In the 1970s an obscure provincial schoolmistress created an organisation to be reckoned with whose aim was to purge British television of filth and blasphemy.

A new book on the Latin American left asks profound questions about the quality of societies being constructed and comes up with a fascinating portrait of left-wing administrations seeking to balance their supporters’ demands with the dictates of market orthodoxy.

Seamus Heaney’s conception of poetry meant he had to trust that his disciplined tending of the ground would lead to harvest, that if the writing self was kept open the poems would come through.

A biography of the celebrated writer and director Jonathan Miller finds a man who has never forgiven himself for abandoning his first career in medicine.

It is difficult, in a permissive society, to define what is obscene. But to find at least something obscene shows that you are a sentient person.

Far from being a marginal figure in independent Ireland, Wilde was viewed with considerable interest and good will.