From the ‘Troubles’ to Trumpism

In Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), Polish critic Jan Kott defines one purpose of scholarship in the humanities that summarises the chief aim of this project: ‘The writing of history and, above all, literary criticism can, and must , always be understood as an attempt to find in the past aspects of human experience that can shed light on the meaning of our own times’. That is precisely what From the ‘Troubles’ to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960–2023 attempts to do. Aided by the insights