Presented by Kirsty Wark
There have been unconfirmed reports that the UK is considering going it alone, offering billions of pounds of direct loans to the Irish Republic to ease its economic crisis.
Chancellor George said the UK was "ready to support Ireland", as he arrived for an Ecofin meeting in Brussels, adding: "We're going to do what is in Britain's national interest."
Tonight, Paul Mason reports on the likelihood of a UK-Ireland bi-lateral deal, whether it would serve Britain's interests, and on what would be the political fallout of the coalition government using British tax-payers' money to reduce Ireland's economic woes.
The man who chaired the European finance ministers' meeting, Belgian politician Didier Reynders, has played down talk of a potential EU bailout for Ireland, saying the ministers did not discuss the issue in detail as the Irish have not asked for help.
But he did nonetheless say that the EU was "ready to act" if needed.
Tonight we will also be looking at the wider crisis in the Eurozone, and whether it spells disaster for the European project with commentators from Britain, Germany and Ireland.
We have the last in our series of films on Vladimir Putin's Russia. In this report correspondent Rupert Wingfield Hayes, who spent four years reporting in Russia, asks whether Russians are really looking to be led by a "Good Tsar".
Trollope biographer Victoria Glendinning has complained of a lack of appetite among publishers for serious biography nowadays, and the judges of the Costa biography book prize have said they could not find enough biographies of merit to fill their shortlist.
Tonight our reporter Stephen Smith asks if we're seeing the death of the serious biography - a subject we will also discuss in the studio with two biographers.
All that with Kirsty at 10.30pm on BBC Two.
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