“... minds’. Banville has rejected Joyce and Beckett as influences. O’Nolan surprisingly fills the bill. O’Nolan and Banville, although they are both disdainful of it, compel themselves to imagine the ordinary. Brian O’Nolan stayed put in Dublin not least because of this moral conservatism. The best of O’Nolan’s work transforms that personal attachment ...”

“... on such a distasteful subject. The shivering girl was told that if she persisted in her folly, a Bill of Renunciation would be placed before Parliament, and would require her exile from the realm as well as the loss of all titles and income. Finally, at a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, she crumbled and said she’d give up the man in her ...”

“... judging from the frequency with which corrections of one kind and another have been made to B.C. Brown, The Letters and Diplomatic Instructions of Queen Anne (1935, reprinted 1968). Just how successfully it has been carried out it is impossible to say. It was no part of the author’s brief to provide a new edition of Anne’s correspondence, and it would ...”

“... one fear barrier: ‘the overhung corner and rib on Castle Rock where Triermain Eliminate, a Brown and Whillans route, goes straight up, and Harlot Face, a Birkett route, veers out onto the rib, then round and up it out of sight.’ For six years, Craig could not make himself pass this point when leading a climb: he knew exactly where it was, ‘six ...”

“... Senate, not known for its bipartisanship, passed the Covid Hate Crimes Act by 94 votes to 1. The bill, sponsored by the Japanese-American senator Mazie Hirono, is intended to provide funding for police departments to identify hate crimes against Asian Americans. A few days later, a Chinese-American cop in New York sued a Black protester who had taunted him ...”

“... in December 2006 – ‘whether we want to replace them’? The reason seems to be that Gordon Brown was eager to create jobs for BAE shipbuilders in the North-West, while Blair wanted to ensure that the UK would continue in its role as spear-carrier to the US. The US first agreed to provide the UK with submarine-launched ballistic missiles – the Polaris ...”

“... of tea for breakfast: He stirred the milk in the mug, till, turning from clear but dark to pale brown and neutrally uniform, the water had become tea-like, the spoon negotiating the vortex it had set in motion by constantly evading, and sometimes colliding into, the submerged leviathan tea bag. Then he’d retrieved it from the pool on to his spoon, at once ...”

“... the OPC’s better-known operations, such as the channelling – through an official called Irving Brown at the American Federation of Labor – of millions of dollars to the Corsican leader of the Marseille dockers, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, whose members would beat up Communists trying to disrupt the landing of aid, or the activities of the Congress for Cultural ...”

“... the Covid era: ‘tainted, murderous vaccines’; the World Health Organisation in league with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a ‘transnational group of bad actors’; ‘Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide’. And it’s been no better since Wolf was allowed back on ‘X’, as we must now call it after Elon Musk took over Twitter. ‘Ed ...”

“... baby in a Catholic place for unwed mothers and left it with an adoption agency. She later married Bill, a telephone installer from San Bernardino with a mammoth, Nietzsche-style moustache, and became a compulsive gambler and grocery-coupon clipper before dying of drink at 46 in 1996.Unlike Art, however, I never mastered a musical instrument. (Plinking guitar ...”

“... was not a reason to reject it here. After all, in this case it was precisely what he wanted. Even Bill Cash, the most die-hard Eurosceptic of them all, had in 2011 advocated a three-way choice in any referendum: between stay, leave and ‘renegotiate’. Cameron says of his thinking in 2012, when he first started to contemplate an EU referendum, that ‘when ...”

“... gone in, the undertakers with a policeman looking on just shouldering out the coffin. Since the bill is £40 I feel I need a receipt but while the driver ransacks his cab for pad and pencil the policeman saunters over: ‘The body is waiting to go in, sir.’ We make an undignified dash for the church where, hearing the door open, the congregation begin to ...”

“... many passengers from the Ealing area would use Crossrail in preference to the Underground. A bill was submitted to Parliament in 1991, and reluctantly thrown out, because, as in the 1970s, there was a recession and so no available funds. In 2001, Cross London Rail Links, a company set up by the newly formed Transport for London and the Strategic Rail ...”

“... renamed himself after a character on the 1970s television comedy The Brady Bunch. A graduate of Brown and a Rhodes scholar, he cut state funding for higher education by 80 per cent and instituted a law allowing the teaching of Creationism in science classes. Although Louisiana is one of the poorest states, Jindal remained firm in his opposition to ...”

“... the States last September and aired, in edited form, on BBC 4 two months later – has only one: Bill Malone, whose book Country Music USA: A Fifty-Year History (1968) provided the template for Burns’s documentary.‘Going to a dance was sort of like going back home to mama’s, or to grandma’s, for Thanksgiving,’ Malone says, eight minutes in.Country ...”