Billy Leahy on two current group shows: the Mark Garry-curated Plane and The Obsessive Garden

It is the year 34 AD and Bethan, the blind soothsayer of the settlement in the marshes, foretells an attack by the dreaded Vikings, led by the fearsome warrior nicknamed "The Bonebreaker".

It was the sort of morning you'd already like to put a curfew on, to say go no further, this is enough, rest your sorry heat here.

Lionel Shriver, the American writer who won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 for We Need to Talk About Kevin, has been complaining on her blog about book covers.

Two new plays offer contrasting answers to what theatre is all about, says Colin Murphy

There was a big fuss when John Kelly lost his Mystery Train, a good bit of noise about Mary Wilson hosting a new evening radio show, tears from Tubridy (apparently) when he lost his production team earlier in the summer, but not a whisper about what happened to those 45 minutes of news (or was it an hour?) on Saturday lunchtimes on RTÉ Radio 1.

The front pages on Tuesday 22 August announced that British police had charged 11 people with offences relating to the recent alleged bomb plot. The statement issued by the police described the discovery of "bomb-making equipment... chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, electrical components, documents and other items... a number of video recordings – these are sometimes referred to as martyrdom videos".

Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-longlisted novel tells the parallel tales of an orphan girl in India, a 'shadow-class' immigrant in New York and other powerless characters living in the chasm between the modern East and West. By Pankaj Mishra

Commentators complain about public disengagement from politics, but the holiday antics of the main opposition parties and the equally risible response of the government show all too clearly why people have a point when they say they can't be bothered.

Why does journalism appear to consider itself a secular pursuit? Is this syndrome especially a feature of Irish journalism and, if so, why? Writing in the foreword to the annual report of the Catholic Communications Office, Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland, strongly criticised, without naming names, several Irish Sunday newspapers, and urged his flock to use consumer power to effect change in the media.