“The political centre cannot hold,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the opening sentence of his Irish Times column of April 16th. “If this was not already obvious, last Sunday’s [first-round presidential] elections in France have surely made it so.” How, one might ask, does that confident statement stand up after the second round of those elections,…

Enda O’Doherty writes: Our memories of earliest childhood tend for the most part to be fragmentary – in my own case it is mostly just a faint view of the street outside our front door and a largish car parked outside our neighbour’s house, a common model at the time that I was soon able…