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The Best Books of Any Year: Three Variations on Post-Truth

Astrid Alben

‘2016 is almost over but the impact of this year’s political events will reverberate around the globe for decades.’

Brexit Win

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

‘The poor hated the poor, natives hated outsiders, settled migrants hated new incomers, the North hated the South, non-Londoners hated London.’

When Denmark Criminalised Kindness

Lisbeth Zornig Andersen

‘We now know that it is a criminal offence to help refugees in distress.’

The Secret Afterlife of Boats

Anna Badkhen

‘The sea is broken,’ they say. An empty net at night: a drooping lattice of shiny nothingness, a cold and worthless tinsel mesh.

Free will and Brexit

Julian Baggini

‘Whether or not you think 23 June was a great day for Britain and Europe, it was a very bad one for freedom.’

Violence in Blue

Patrick Ball

‘One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.’

He Had His Reasons

Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett on the Hawe family murder-suicide, and what the Irish media’s coverage tells us about the nation’s prejudices.

Best Book of 1991: Mao II by Don DeLillo

Colin Barrett

‘The ultimate goal of each act of art, each work of terror, is to demolish the old, incumbent reality, and create a new one.’

The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion

Kevin Barry

‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’

Crossings

Tim Beckett

‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.

Best Book of 2000: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent

Will Boast

Will Boast on why Lionel Trilling’s The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent is the best book of 2000.

On Sonnet 50

Paula Bohince

‘I love Shakespeare’s slow insistence, which mirrors the action within the poem: there is nothing but grief to reach.’ Paula Bohince on Shakespeare’s sonnet 50.

Cracking Up

Kevin Breathnach

‘It has been several weeks since I slept for more than an hour, and lately I’ve been feeling on the verge of cracking up.’