MURRAY begins his tribute to O'Casey by quoting from Beckett's A Piece of Monologue: "His birth was the death of him." O'Casey was the last of the Irish Literary Revival. He was working-class who worked at manual labouring until his 40s. This is the Dublin to which we are introduced in the first half of this marvellous read, the city of the biggest red light district in Europe, the Dublin of subjected, starved and tenemented natives, the Dublin that made the playwright. It's a sweeping read, with the usual line-up: Yeats, Lady Gregory, Jim Larkin, Shaw, Beckett, and of course the supreme comrade himself . . . O'Casey's hero, Stalin who duped the blinkered, communist O'Casey. But then he wasn't the only one he duped. A monumental read.

Ramblin' Man: The Life And Times Of Woody Guthrie By Ed Cray Norton Books £11.99 488pp

GUTHRIE was another class warrior and, like O'Casey, he also had something of a religious streak in him. In the song 'Jesus Christ', for example, he sang the words "The bankers and the preachers they nailed Him on a cross". He would have turned in his urn had he heard Bush followers celebrating their hero's re-election in Washington back in 2004 by singing his ballad "This Land is Your Land". Guthrie was the real thing. He tramped around the United States, meeting the people he sang about. He wrote a memoir, Bound For Glory, a gilded and sometimes sentimental version of his life, a version that Ed Cray sets out to correct. He delves into the problems that befell the Guthrie family and the reasons why Woody turned into a tramp.

Bono On Bono Conversations With Michka Assayas Hodder & Stoughton £8 337pp

ASSAYAS is a music journalist and obviously a friend of Bono. As an interviewer, he seems a little awestruck so we can take it that he won't be the one to write the Great Man's biography. What we have here, instead, is a collection of entertaining conversations between the pair.

How Bono used his fame to bring the world to rights; the IRA ceasefire, the AIDS crisis in Africa, Third World debt. Bono talks revealingly about his childhood, the fraught relationship he had with his recently deceased father, his much publicised Christianity, about the Irish and their hypocrisy: The way they can get apologetic about an IRA bomb going off in England and that same evening belt out republican songs down in the boozer.

He hates the duplicity of the Irish. No surprise, then, when Gerry Adams called him "a little shit".

The Visitor By Maeve Brennan New Island Books /8.99 106pp

LIKE its author, this novel is a bit of a mystery. Amazingly, for it is a beautiful read, it lay hidden away for 60 years. Twenty-two-year old Anastasia has lived in Paris for six years with her mother, away from her father and grandmother. Following the death of her mother, she returns to the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh. She spent those years in Paris comforting her distraught mother who had escaped there from a disastrous marriage.

Now she returns to the house where she was raised, to the house where her grandmother, Mrs King, lives alone. Mrs King bristles in the presence of Anastasia, hates her for supporting the woman who first took away her son and then left him. In truth, Mrs King, a manipulative monster, was the cause of her son's marriage failing and now she has a new victim.

The Private World Of Georgette Heyer By Jane Aiken Hodge Arrow Books £9.00 223pp

IN REALITY, Ms Heyer was Mrs Rougier. Before that she was Stella Martin, a pseudonym she used when she wrote for Mills & Boon. Yes, Georgette Heyer, writer of Regency romances, was a lover of privacy to a pathological degree. She never gave interviews, never spoke about her childhood, or her early working years. Her private life remained a blank to outsiders.

Yet she wrote best-seller after best-seller without any obvious publicity. Indeed, she was almost a recluse.

But she was a compulsive communicator and Hodge was given access to archive papers and family letters, letters that reveal a really tough-minded woman with strong social views and not at all what you would expect from the purveyor of frothy frivolity. For devotees? Definitely.

Balsamic Dreams By Joe Queenan Picador £10.99 200pp

IF you find yourself thinking in most situations, "What would Larry David do?" you'll probably enjoy this. Like the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Queenan is a middleaged grouch, and here he directs his fire at one of the world's great plagues: the Baby Boomers. Being a boomer himself, Queenan knows his quarry, castigating them for "epic self-absorption, staggering greed, a fiendish obsession with staying young, [and] dreadful hair". The Boomers make up 25% of the US population and their crimes, according to Queenan, are legion: selling out but not admitting it, popularising the "message" t-shirt, making a star out of Rod Stewart, and hugging.

"Flower children never let me touch them when they were young and nubile, so why should I hug them now they are old and fat?"

Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios By Clinton Heylin Canongate £10.99 402pp

WHEN Charlton Heston suggested that Orson Welles direct his next film Touch Of Evil, the studio execs stared at him, he said, "as though I'd asked to have my mother direct". Released in 1958, it proved to be the last of six films Welles made for Hollywood, and the job ended as so many of them did, with the director being fired and his film being edited against his wishes. How different from Welles's arrival in Tinseltown nearly 20 years earlier, when "the wunderkind from Wisconsin" was given unprecedented creative control by RKO. The result?

Citizen Kane and an awful lot of jealous peers. Delving into the studio archives, Clinton Heylon uncovers the avalanche of malice started by studio bosses who didn't like what Welles was doing. Heylin deserves a medal for rescuing Welles's reputation from those who have suggested his failures were self-inflicted. CW