A week ago, asked by an editor to provide some background details about myself, I said that I had grown up in Northern Ireland and still loved it, because its geography had always been prettier than its politics. I had been thinking lately that even the politics weren’t as ugly as they used to be [...]

The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff Press, £25, 752 pp) is a big book, heavy enough, in the words of its editor, Patricia Craig, “to knock some sense into the heads of bigots and belligerents”. If I were a different sort of Ulsterman, I’d be banging it on the heads of literary editors, most of whom have [...]