How can it be, in Ireland’s cool, damp climate, that wildfire has raged across vast swathes of rural scrubland and forest two springtimes in a row? In the new Dublin Review, Rachel Andrews goes to Donegal and Kerry to report on the fascinating causes and the damage done.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh revisited Cairo, where he lived for a few months six years ago, at the time of the recent elections; his journal vividly evokes the utterly transformed atmosphere in the city in the aftermath of a stalled revolution.

Also in the spring issue – which has an unpremeditated West of Ireland landscape theme – we publish Tim Robinson’s ‘A Land without Shortcuts’: a passionate, artful plea, sometimes ‘in the teeth of all rational argumentation’, for the preservation of the distinctiveness of places against the forces of sameness; and Donald Mahoney goes to Achill to experience the henge-like structure that the builder Joe McNamara, a.k.a. the ‘Anglo Avenger’, has erected there. Plus: Ian Sansom’s diary for 2011; Ed O’Loughlin on an uncanny Arctic fugitive; and a short story by Anthony Caleshu …