When it comes to love affairs, or romantic entanglements, the question of who is luring whom can be a complex one. A Kenyan bishop, Hieronymus Emusugut Joya, has asked women to respect the celibacy of Catholic priests and not to tempt or “force them into affairs”. He has banned overnight guests at priests’ residences, and…

The US Vice-President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha have recently welcomed the birth of their fourth child. Yet American fertility as a whole continues to plummet. It’s down to an average of 1.6 infants per woman, with a marked trend, as elsewhere, towards the one-child family. Meanwhile, in China, society is coping with the…

My cousins in the Bordeaux region have been told to stay away from their home until these terrible wildfires – and the destruction and poisonous smoke they’ve caused – have receded. Appropriately, the scenes in south-western France, and Spain have been called ‘apocalyptic’. And in this summer of extreme heatwaves, climate change sceptics are being…

You’ll have noticed that there’s a current fascination with the ancient world, exemplified by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie of The Odyssey, and the likes of Prof. Mary Beard constantly extolling the glories of Imperial Rome. Dominance Books tracing the dominance of pre-Christian Greece and Rome, and their influence on our civilisation flow regularly off the…

In the screen documentary about Edna O’Brien’s life, The Blue Road, made shortly before her death, the Co. Clare author said that one of her regrets was that she’d been so hopeless at managing money. She’d earned plenty of it, but she’d often been broke just the same. I’ve experienced, at a lesser level, similar…