The title of Colm Tóibín’s new story collection seems to promise, at first glance, a return to familiar territory: a tour, perhaps, of old stomping grounds; a reconnection with earlier work. But as the pages turn, that suggestion of affinity is revealed to be a subtle bait and switch. The stories in this collection, it turns out, have to do with displacement, not familiarity; their news is not from Dublin, but from the places where Dublin’s news might land. They interrogate what it means, and how it feels, to live at one remove: from home, from loved ones, from the past.

That sense of dislocation is established in the opening story, The Journey to Galway, set during the first world war, in which once again the interaction between title and content proves delicately wrongfooting. This “journey”, we discover, is not about attaining a longed-for destination, nor even really about forward motion; rather, it’s a moment of suspension, between one reality and the next. An unnamed woman remembers the morning on which she received a telegram telling her that her son, a pilot in the British airforce, had been killed in action over Italy. On hearing the news, she knows she must take the train to Galway, to inform her son’s wife, Margaret. “In Margaret’s mind,” the woman realises, as she stares out of the train window, “Robert was still alive. Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time …” And it is this liminal time, untethered and provisional, that is the “journey” of the title – a Schrödinger’s-cat caesura, in which the terrible event both has and hasn’t taken place. “Until she appeared in the doorway of that house, there would not be death,” the woman thinks. “But once she appeared, death would live in that house.”

If this seems an oddly abstract reflection for a newly bereaved mother, that’s no accident: abstraction is the essential quality of Tóibín’s collection. Again and again, he takes devastating raw materials – a father on the cusp of indefinite separation from his daughter; a man struggling to save a brother who is slowly dying – and presents them lightly, obliquely, allowing his readers to absorb the breadth of their implications before becoming overwhelmed. Grief, betrayal and moral complication are rendered in calm, frictionless paragraphs; Tóibín lulls the reader into a kind of complicit attentiveness, so that the full force of what has happened only lands after the sentence, or the story, has finished. In place, time, and perspective, the collection jumps about wildly – the action moves from Spain to San Francisco, to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, to Argentina; from male to female and from first person to third; from the early 20th century to the 50s to the present day. But the lambent prose, the tone of cool reflection: these are what bind these stories, transforming them from separate moments into a coherent whole.

Those qualities are front and centre in the collection’s final two stories, A Free Man and The Catalan Girls. Here, Tóibín takes off the brakes, allowing them to swell and expand so that, collectively, they’re longer than the rest of the stories put together. The Catalan Girls, which is closer in length to a novella, tells the tale of three sisters, uprooted from Catalonia to Argentina in their early teens. Patiently, probingly, Tóibín considers the different ways in which they adopt and adapt to their new home, and the range of their responses when, half a century later, they discover that an aunt whom they haven’t seen since childhood has left them her house in Catalonia in her will. The story’s length permits nuances of allegiance, language and loss to emerge, so that when the final, quiet conclusion is reached, it lands like a blow.

But it is A Free Man that is the collection’s standout piece. If there’s a flaw in the other stories, it’s that the sense of abstraction can tip over into a lack of feeling; the characters at times read as dispassionate observers of their lives and circumstances, rather than flesh-and-blood participants. But in A Free Man, the question of the extent to which our passions define us is the point. The story follows the path of Joe, a man in late middle age, newly released from prison in Ireland and disowned by his family. The nature of Joe’s crimes, and the breadth of his guilt, are unveiled slowly, alongside other details from his life that may – or may not – contextualise them. These gradual revelations are interspersed with cheerless scenes from his current existence: a bruising encounter with a banking clerk; a stuffy hotel room, where he “woke and slept and woke again” and arose feeling “drained” and “desperate”. As past and present unfold in tandem, our empathy builds even as our unease mounts – and Tóibín’s decision to leave us poised between the two, without resolution, sits as a comment on the ambiguity at the heart of the tale. In A Free Man, form and content come together to enhance one another, and the result is a story of profound, disquieting power.

The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

It was the family home where William Wordsworth hosted Alfred, Lord Tennyson, lived as poet laureate and worked on his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude.

Now, after a long period of decline in visitor numbers, Rydal Mount and Gardens has been saved from descending into the “half-choked with willow flowers and weeds” state that Wordsworth described in his 1814 poem The Excursion – and will be preserved by a charity that will ensure it remains open to the public.

The Lake District site, near Ambleside, was the residence of the Romantic poet for 37 years until his death in 1850. Wordsworth lived there with his wife and children, as well as his sister and fellow writer, Dorothy.

The property had recently been placed on the market for £2.5m by Wordsworth’s descendants. The running of the literary museum had become unsustainable owing to rising operational costs and a fall in visitor numbers to fewer than 20,000 a year.

The house had last been bought in 1969 by Wordsworth’s great-great-granddaughter Mary Henderson and was opened to the public the next year. The museum once had 40,000 visitors a year.

Simon Armitage, the UK’s poet laureate, said he was delighted by the acquisition of “the iconic home of one of my heroes and forefathers as poet laureate, and that Rydal Mount will continue to be a place of creativity and inspiration”.

While living at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth revised The Prelude, his epic autobiographical poem, and his travel book, A Guide Through the District of the Lakes. The house contains a framed copy of Wordsworth’s letter to Queen Victoria in which he initially declined her offer to be poet laureate.

Other notable guests at the house include fellow Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, as well as the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Although Wordsworth only rented Rydal Mount, he designed the layout of the five-acre gardens and added his own “writing hut” to the grounds.

Michael McGregor, the director of the Wordsworth Trust, said: “Acquiring Rydal Mount gives us an opportunity to tell a much richer story about the lives and works of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The news of its sale came as a cautionary tale of how precarious the Wordsworths’ heritage in the Lake District has become.”

The Wordsworth Trust is also the custodian of Dove Cottage, the Wordsworths’ first Lake District home, which opened to the public in 1891. It looks after an archive of Wordsworth’s manuscripts and Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals.

After the cottage became too small for his growing family, Wordsworth lived in Allan Bank from 1808 to 1811, before moving to the much larger Rydal Mount in 1813.

Last year the actors Brian Cox and Miriam Margolyes joined a campaign to save the house as a site of literary heritage.

The previous owners of Rydal Mount, Christopher Andrew and Simon Bennie, said they had “worked hard to keep the house open” to the public, despite the drop in visitors since the Covid pandemic.

“Over the years we have had a very good relationship with the Wordsworth Trust and so it was with great relief that at the beginning of the sale process it became clear that Rydal Mount was likely to pass into their safe hands,” they said.

The house and grounds will remain closed to the public for the immediate future as maintenance work is carried out.

The Wordsworth Trust is largely funded by Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Garfield Weston Foundation, Westmorland and Furness council and Lancaster University.

Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him. However, it is an intimate, and sometimes moving, family portrait as well as a social history of race, class and aspiration in late 20th‑century Britain.

The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and “Run, Paki, run” taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.

Javid doesn’t shy away from showing the cruelty of 1970s and 80s Britain for brown and black kids. White neighbours and co‑workers help the family inhabit the same space as racists, and the book makes it clear that the system is hostile even when individuals can be kind.

The Colour of Home is an affecting study of Javid’s parents, particularly his indefatigable mother. Her illiteracy sits in counterpoint to her fierce commitment to her sons’ education: spotless uniforms, regimented homework and trips to Rochdale Library. Javid’s father is shown as a man of energy but limited luck: a bus driver who repeatedly launches small clothing businesses that almost always fail.

School is a site of trauma. Javid does not airbrush the brutality of playground racism – from the boy trying to “rub the black off” his own arm with sandpaper, to Javid’s shame‑soaked rejection of a black classmate in order to fit in.

Alongside these scenes is the story of intellectual ignition: the tutor who continues to teach him for free, the pink pages of the Financial Times abandoned on a bus, the sense that reading could be a reliable means of escape.

Javid is not a natural writer; the prose is a bit “Jack and Jill”, and it could have done with a sharp edit. It is at its best when it occupies a Dickensian domestic precariousness, the presence of bailiffs, the stock that never sells, the children in trouble. These short, vivid chapters – “Dettol and determination”, “Britain’s most dangerous street” – carry a clear narrative. The memoir’s argument about meritocracy is more nuanced than Javid’s political slogans ever were.

Politically, the memoir compels because it refuses to tidy away contradiction. Javid’s father moves from scepticism about Margaret Thatcher to voting for her, even as his own life is crushed between property developers, debt and deregulated markets. Javid is clearly inspired by his father to rise through the Conservatives, but this sits disturbingly next to the book’s record of racism.

In fact, reading his story in the context of the past decade of Tory rule illustrates how his party exploited the narratives of children like him while entrenching policies that brutalised people who look like his parents. For instance, when he was home secretary in 2019, Javid shamefully revoked Shamima Begum’s British citizenship shortly after she was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp. Begum had been trafficked to Syria as a 15-year-old in 2015.

Similarly, his successor Priti Patel’s posture as a child of immigrants “taking back control” functioned as political cover for policies that coerced people into destitution. The “hostile environment” approach to immigration enforcement, initiated by Theresa May, but a persistent feature of Home Office culture after her departure, fostered racist practices and contributed directly to the Windrush scandal, in which black Britons were detained and threatened with removal from a country they had the full legal right to call home. Javid later claimed he didn’t like the term “hostile environment”, but nevertheless defended and maintained the structures that perpetuated it.

Suella Braverman’s stint as home secretary took this fusion of identity politics and punitive policy even further, marrying the image of a British Asian woman in one of the great offices of state to apocalyptic language about “invasions” of small‑boat arrivals. Her speeches repeatedly framed a “law‑abiding patriotic majority” against desperate people crossing the Channel. In both cases, the presence of non‑white women at the top of the Home Office did not soften the edge of Conservative immigration policy; it helped insulate a hardening border regime from charges of racism while it continued to inflict racialised harm. And while Javid might not have been a member of the government by then, he remained a member of the party for which these were official positions.

Racist rhetoric and policy have now become defining features of mainstream British politics. Recent reporting about Nigel Farage’s time at Dulwich College underlines how little distance there is between the corridors of elite education, racist language and political success. Taken together with The Colour of Home’s scenes of playground racism, these testimonies show continuity rather than rupture: the same casual dehumanisation of Jews, black people and Asians.

In this context, its portrait of a boy learning to survive and outthink that environment – and his insistence that education, solidarity and institutional self‑scrutiny are the only real antidotes – feels less like a nostalgic political origin story and more like an urgent warning about the Britain that comes next. Javid, cheerfully now in the “Big House”, can at times sound like an Uncle Tom: his narrative minimises structural barriers and suggests minorities simply need to work harder in order to succeed.

His decision to concentrate on his early years and write little about his rise through the Tory party represents a serious omission. Surely he has much to tell about the inner workings of the now imploded Conservatives. But perhaps he’s saving that for another volume. It would be fun to read if he can be as honest about that as he is about his childhood.

The author Jilly Cooper suffered a fatal head injury during a fall at her Gloucestershire home, an inquest has heard.

Cooper, 88, whose 18 novels include Riders and Rivals, was found by family at her home in Bisley at about 5pm on 4 October.

She was initially alert and paramedics transferred her to Gloucestershire Royal hospital, but her condition deteriorated, Gloucestershire coroners court heard.

She died in hospital, with her family present, at 8.30am on 5 October.

The senior coroner for Gloucestershire, Katy Skerrett, reached a conclusion of accidental death and said Cooper had died as a result of a traumatic subdural haematoma.

“The circumstances surrounding her tragic death were she had suffered an unwitnessed fall at her home address on 4 October,” Skerrett said. “She fell, perhaps down some stairs, sustaining a significant head injury.

“There were no suspicious circumstances surrounding her fall. She passed away later, on 5 October, with family present.”

Cooper is best known for the Rutshire Chronicles, which follow the scandals of the upper classes in the fictional Cotswolds county of Rutshire. The second novel in the series, Rivals, was adapted for Disney+ and released last year.

Her novels were often described as “bonkbusters”, but to her they were “a bit of everything”, she told the Guardian in 2016. “But if they want to call it bonkbuster they can – except it ought to be called ‘shagbuster’ now, bonk is out of date.”

Her death prompted tributes from high-profile figures including Queen Camilla, who said in a statement: “Very few writers get to be a legend in their own lifetime but Jilly was one, creating a whole new genre of literature and making it her own through a career that spanned over five decades … may her hereafter be filled with impossibly handsome men and devoted dogs.”

Cooper was given a damehood in the 2024 new year honours list for her services to literature and charity.

The former prime minister Rishi Sunak, famously a fan of her works, wrote on X: “Sad to hear of the passing of Dame Jilly Cooper, a storyteller whose wit and love of character brought joy to millions. My thoughts are with her family and fellow readers.”

Eighty years since the first of a beloved fleet of trains was introduced to the world, a national blue plaque is being unveiled at the redbrick house in Gloucestershire where the Rev W Awdry worked on his railway stories.

The addition of the new Historic England plaque to Wilbert Awdry’s old address in Stroud is expected to prompt fans of Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow locomotives to make a pilgrimage to the street to pay their respects.

Awdry’s daughter, Veronica Chambers, said the family was delighted: “It’s an enormous privilege and an honour. Father would have been very surprised.”

The unveiling ceremony at Awdry’s former home, named Sodor after the fictional island his anthropomorphic engines inhabited, also forms part of this year’s Railway 200 celebrations.

Awdry was working as a curate in Kings Norton, Birmingham, when the first book in the series, The Three Railway Engines, was published in 1945. On his retirement in 1965, Awdry and his family moved to Stroud, where he continued developing the world of Sodor.

Chambers said Awdry’s requirements for the house included a room for his study and another to host a model railway.

“He felt what he was doing with his stories was as much an outreach to people as being a parish priest,” said Chambers. “Lots of people used to write to him for advice, a bit like an agony aunt. He was non-judgmental and understood children.”

Since his death in 1997 at the age of 85, the phenomenon of Thomas has continued to grow across the world, helped by television adaptations.

A stained glass window starring the tank engine has been installed at St Mary Magdalene church in Stroud and enthusiasts are often found there.

Chambers said Awdry would have been surprised at the idea of fans visiting Gloucestershire. “I don’t think he could ever quite understand why Thomas and his friends were so popular. I think it’s because children are pretty much the same anywhere in the world and they seem to relate to the different characters – Thomas is cheeky, Percy misunderstands things and Gordon is big and bossy.”

Nigel Prenter, a Stroud district councillor, said one of his grandchildren had all the books in the series and slept with one under his pillow every night. He said: “Just this week my wife, Joanne, showed three Japanese visitors the stained glass window, which they had come specifically to see.”

Duncan Wilson, the chief executive of Historic England, said it was an honour to celebrate Awdry and the happiness he brought to so many childhoods. He said: “The early books, which would become The Railway Series, laid the foundation for a global phenomenon, based on the magic of the steam train.”

The heritage minister, Fiona Twycross, said: “Our railways are a vital part of our national heritage, and the Rev Awdry’s books are an excellent example of how they can spark creativity and imagination.”

Actors Brian Cox, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Conti as well as the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce are among those calling for the home of William Wordsworth to be saved as a site of literary heritage.

The Romantic poet lived at Rydal Mount in the Lake District from 1813 to his death in 1850. The property has five acres of gardens which were designed by Wordsworth.

He had rented the house, but in the late 1960s it was bought by his descendants, and has since been open to the public for most of the year. However, after the Covid pandemic, visitor numbers dropped sharply and the house was put on the market for offers over £2.5m.

Wordsworth’s great great great great granddaughter, Charlotte Wontner, is now leading a campaign to encourage financial backers to step in and help preserve the house and gardens so that they can be kept open for the public.

“It’s too often we are losing our incredible links with the past and this is one major link to the past that we cannot lose”, said Succession actor Cox.

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“This forthcoming sale of Rydal Mount is a mistake”, said Margolyes. “It can be stopped. This treasure belongs to the nation – as much as it does William Wordsworth.”

Wontner, whose grandmother bought Rydal Mount in 1969, described it as a “living museum”. The gardens “are where Wordsworth wrote many of his poems and when people get there, there is this wonderful sense of being closer to the poetry.”

She said that Wordsworth’s poetry is becoming increasingly important because of his appreciation for nature and the environment.

Her cousin, Christopher, who is selling the house, is supportive of the campaign, she said. “We all have the same goal which is to find a way of keeping the house open to people. There may be other relatives who feel the same way and I hope they will get in touch.”

The house has “always been referred to, I think, as a place of solace, and that is an important thing nowadays. A place to just have a break from the everyday craziness.”

The former children’s laureate Anne Fine has said parents should consider letting pupils learn online instead of going to school.

Instead of punishing families for child absenteeism, society should ask itself what school refusers are trying to say – and how it can accommodate them, she said.

Fine, who on Thursday published On the Wall, her 95th book, said absenteeism numbers in school were “absolutely startling”. She added: “You have to ask yourself, why are the numbers so high and is there a way to bring them down?

“I 100% think that an idea that needs pursued and thought about is that there should be a slipstream of online learning for the children who would prefer to learn that way,” she said. “Absenteeism is so bad now that we’re no longer in a situation where we can dismiss an idea like this. I think it might work out incredibly well.”

The proportion of pupils classified as persistently absent – missing more than one in 10 lessons – has more than doubled in England since the pandemic. From 10.9% in 2018-19, it rose to 22.3% in 2022-23.

Data in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is collected separately because education is devolved, but indicates a similar trend.

The research agency Public First has called the situation a “full-blown national crisis”, saying that pupils most likely to be absent include those on free school meals and with special educational needs.

Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has emphasised the importance of attendance, saying that all children, even those with mild or moderate anxiety, are likely to be better off in school.

But Fine, who has won the Carnegie medal for writing twice, said: “We learned that teaching online can work because it did for a lot of children during Covid. So, the question shouldn’t be, ‘Why aren’t these children going to school?’ because we shouldn’t still be making the simplistic assumption that every child is better off in school.”

She added: “If the child doesn’t want to go into school, we should ask if they’re really worse off at home. For many, the answer will be ‘possibly not’ – and for those who can’t manage to socialise at school, the answer will be ‘probably not’.”

Fine counts herself as having been one of those children. “I hated socialising at school,” she said. “‘Now choose a partner to work with’ are my least favourite words in the entire English language.

“For those of my temperament, I don’t think that’s unusual – and I don’t think my temperament is that unusual either. There must be lots of children who would be happier not learning in school.

“Even now if you put me in a room with 29 other people I didn’t choose to be with, all day and every day, and with whom my only link is that we’re of the same age, I’d be miserable. Why shouldn’t children feel the same?”

Fine suggested society should question the entire assumption behind the way it educates its young people.

“If you go back to first principles, would you invent a system where you take a load of children who have got nothing in common at all, and pump them in and teach them all together?” she asked.

Fine has a theory: she said education had been changing long before Covid – children had been encouraged to be self-aware, autonomous individuals rather than empty vessels whose role it was to store the knowledge bestowed on them.

But then Covid came along. This, for everyone, was a “watershed” moment, said Fine, when society realised the internet offered an alternative way to learn. And children did too.

“For the children who had already felt that school wasn’t quite right the way it was before, they now saw an alternative,” she said. “And that’s how we should be looking at this now. Not through the lens of it being a massive problem that needs to be dealt with through fines, which will be disastrous financially for families and do nothing for relations between the school and the family, or the parent and the child.

“Absenteeism should be thought of as, ‘Here are a lot of children trying to tell us something. How can we accommodate what it is they’re telling us?’”

The text messages that open Brittney Griner’s memoir are a chilling short story. “Hey baby I got stopped by security at customs.” “If you don’t hear from me for like one hour or more get my agent on the phone.” “Wake up plz.” “Baby text me plz I’m freaking out.” “Baby.” “Hello.” “This is it for me.”

The date was 17 February 2022 and Griner, one of the best basketball players in the world, was at a Moscow airport on her way to meet up with UMMC Ekaterinburg, for whom she played in the WNBA off-season. Back at her Arizona home it was 2am and her wife, Relle, was sleeping. Two near-empty vials of medicinal cannabis oil had just been found in Griner’s bag. Her phone and passport were taken, and she was made to sign a document in a language she didn’t understand. After 19 hours at customs, she was led away in handcuffs. “The future,” she writes in Coming Home, “was unimaginable.”

Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. The detention of an American double Olympic champion on drugs charges was a political plot-point, and Griner’s ordeal was sealed. While her family, friends and fellow athletes lobbied the White House to secure her release, celebrities including Justin Bieber and Jada Pinkett Smith joined their #WeAreBG campaign to keep up the pressure. It took nine months before state officials finally brought Griner home through a prisoner exchange.

In this book she reveals the reality of what she went through during that time and the result is a biography that could legitimately be shelved under horror. The details may be grim but it’s the descent into powerlessness that is so disturbing, as Griner is sucked into a draconian and corrupt penal system where her future freedom depends on no less comforting a figure than Vladimir Putin himself.

It is some feat to create so much suspense in a story when the world already knows the outcome. The tension builds from the very first page, as we’re thrown at pace into the entirely avoidable accident that precipitates events. Griner, rushing for a flight, throws her travel items into a carry-on she hasn’t properly checked. She misses her plane from JFK, catches the next. “If my day had gone as planned,” she muses, later. “If. If. If.”

Instead, in an unusually busy customs hall, the 6ft 9in black athlete is among a group of foreigners pulled out of the line for a bag search, and in a zipped pocket at the back is a forgotten vape cartridge. Its contents aren’t enough to get anyone high, but they are enough to land her a charge of smuggling as well as possession.

We follow Griner’s nightmare journey through various places of imprisonment. Denied bail, she was held ahead of trial at a women’s prison outside Moscow, reliant on the kindness of an English-speaking cellmate, Alena, to help her navigate her way through its rules and routines. The squalor and humiliations mount, from the rusty-brown showers to the strip-searches from guards who refuse to believe she’s a woman. In one filthy basement cell, “the walls were covered in black soot and piss, or whatever bodily fluid I smelled”.

After the shock of her sentencing – Griner received nine years, nearly the maximum penalty – she is transported to a former gulag and the train journey takes over a week. Lying inside a cage, on a metal bunk far too small for her frame, she regrets the loss of one of her few possessions, the sudoku book that she had kept with her since her arrest. Relle had already completed one of the puzzles and signed her name next to it. “When I felt down I turned to that page and rubbed her signature on my cheek.”

Griner’s co-writer, Michelle Burford, a founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, weaves the swooping drama of the high-stakes narrative with empathic glimpses of Griner’s upbringing. Growing up black and extremely tall attracted plenty of unwelcome attention, while her parents worried there was something medically wrong with her. When she came out, her father, Ray, who had fought in the Vietnam war before becoming a policeman, yelled at her (“I ain’t raising no gay bitch!”) and she left home. And yet their ongoing love for each other is palpable, and the toughness he instilled in her helped her survive in prison.

We learn, too, about the efforts that Relle, a lawyer, and Griner’s tireless agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, were making while she grappled with the prospect of being incarcerated for a decade. “A freedom campaign has a question at its heart,” writes Griner: “‘Who deserves our sympathy?’” It is, perhaps, the book’s most powerful and poignant question. Griner’s story ends not with her return to the WNBA, but with a list of Americans still held hostage around the world, including former marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia.

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Her book should also shout a warning about the dangerous political waters in which the sports industry defiantly continues to swim. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect women’s basketballers to turn down life-changing sums to play in an overseas league run by oligarchs and former spies, especially when their own national league makes them fly economy. But you can question the “bubble” mentality and moral ignorance that accompanies the decision-making of both the athletes and those running international sport.

Griner herself loved the seven years she played in Russia and admits: “I couldn’t see the dirty politics, the corruption, the old-school views of women.” The country’s record on LGBTQ+ rights didn’t seem to factor either, since she herself always felt safe. What is so frightening about sportswashing, from the Qatari World Cup to Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf and Pro League football, is that it appears irresistible to athletes, administrators and fans alike.

Even since Griner’s arrest, a number of Americans, including current WNBA players Kayla Thornton and Monique Billings, continued to play in the Russian league. Some who find the prospect too uncomfortable have headed to Turkey instead. Griner herself has made a successful return to basketball and will represent the USA in the Olympics later this month. Her professional comeback is all the more extraordinary given the difficulties she has continued to face, from PTSD episodes to security threats that required her and Relle to sell their home. The couple are expecting the birth of their first child this month: expect Griner’s story to be one of the most talked about in Paris.

In the week that Ireland turns ­everything green and celebrates its diaspora, a new online archive has given voice to the human cost paid by generations of emigrants.

More than 7,000 letters from emigrants to North America spanning four centuries have been collected and digitised, giving poignant insight into the homesickness, tribulations, and occasional triumphs, of those who crossed the Atlantic.

They tell of Pennsylvania coal­mines, Minnesota winters, Boston slums, and the desperate struggle to adapt and survive – and to make peace with the likelihood of never seeing home again.

Kerby Miller, a US historian, amassed the trove over nearly six decades by combing archives and private collections, and making public appeals for letters, memoirs and other documents in trunks, drawers and attics, yielding more than 150,000 pages spanning the late 1600s to the 20th century.

The University of Galway has placed the collection in a digital repository that is searchable and free to access, creating a new window on Irish, US and Canadian history in time for St Patrick’s Day.

On Sunday, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, is to present the US president, Joe Biden – who has called himself a “proud son” of Ireland – with a bowl of shamrocks at the White House, concluding a week of events in Washington and across the world that celebrate diaspora success stories.

The Galway project, called Imirce, illuminates darker parts of a mass migration that included the Great Famine of the 1840s and depopulated Ireland. “All the emigrants, whether middle class or from poor labouring backgrounds, had to adjust to a country that was in a much more advanced state of hypercapitalism,” said Miller.

“Life in America was just so much more competitive. There were a lot of people who metaphorically fell by the wayside and some who barely survived. And there were others who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.”

The letters reveal struggles and heartache, said the historian. “A common theme is the longing for home and the sadness that they probably will never be able to return home. Another is the obligation to send money back, which often they can barely afford, and also to pay for the passage of younger brothers and sisters.”

Letters sent home – a key plot device in Colm Tóibín’s diaspora novel Brooklyn, later made into a film starring Saoirse Ronan – also showed hope and pride, said Miller. “Many immigrants were happy to be in America. They felt they had more opportunity to be independent – that’s a word they often used. For instance, owning their own farm or shop, not having to take their hats off in the presence of the landlord, or obey the wishes of a priest.”

One letter from New York to Cork in the 1930s details the author’s sex life.

Miller began collecting the material when he was a young scholar in the late 1960s and never stopped. He turned a doctoral dissertation into a book, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, that was nominated for a Pulitzer prize in 1986.

The University of Missouri emeritus professor donated his collection to the University of Galway on condition it be transcribed, digitised and added to, with continued appeals for more documents.

The letters dispel any myths that the Irish found America paved with gold, said Breandán Mac Suibhne, a University of Galway historian who is part of the team leading the project. “A lot of these people had very difficult lives. If some experienced the American dream, others experienced the American nightmare.”

Some letters made coded references to relatives back home, said Mac Suibhne. “They might say this is no country for a drunkard or someone who doesn’t want to work – a way of saying don’t send over uncle Johnny.” Mac Suibhne would like to extend the project to letters from England, Wales and Scotland.

Daniel Carey, a professor of English at the University of Galway, said the correspondence ­conveyed rich, myriad impressions of a new world. “It’s a much more subtle resource when you can hear people’s voices.”

One woman, writing from Philadelphia in 1836, gave a wary endorsement of two sons of ­family friends from Derry. “They are in ­genteel employment and promise to be graceful and sober citizens.”

During an era of anti-­immigrant sentiment in the US and in Ireland, the letters were first-hand testimony of what drove people to uproot and seek new lives, said Carey. “It’s a reminder of their eagerness to work. They’re making a contribution as domestic servants and in demanding industries. It’s a record of people’s desire to get on.”