Looking back at the everyday rhythms of a long-vanished past

Politics: Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, By Clair Wills , Penguin, €30

Based on the phenomenal success of reprints of old textbooks such as Soundings, which showed the appetite for nostalgia among Irish readers, I wonder if the Irish Catholic Truth Society couldn’t unlock a goldmine by reprinting bizarre curios such as its 1953 Catholic Handbook for Irish Men and Women Going to England.

Placing all moral responsibility, and ...