“... 1950s by a broad range of scholars such as R.B. McDowell, Owen Dudley Edwards, F.S.L. Lyons and Patrick O’Farrell has profoundly altered our understanding: not only have ancient myths been invalidated, but the structure of a genuinely Irish history now exists, free from the Anglo-centric emphasis still common twenty years ago. Questions can be asked about ...”

“... passes over Monsieur Conaire, who pursues Mercier and Camier to a hotel in Beckett’s first French novel. The cognates Muldoon finds for Beckett’s name are Old Irish and English, becc and boc, which sound like characters from one of the late plays. He neglects Beckett’s French Huguenot background, which the author ...”

“... And while much of the centenary publishing has just been recladding (both Methuen and Samuel French have produced handsome new editions), there has also been a collected lyrics, a book of quotations and three extra volumes of stage work from Methuen, including several plays and many short pieces long out of print or never published before. Only the BBC ...”

“... were members of the IRA, which had emerged in 1919 to consolidate the Irish Republic declared by Patrick Pearse and others in the Easter Rising of 1916. The republican cause was strengthened by the victory of Sinn Féin in the December 1918 UK general election: they ran on an abstentionist platform and won 73 of the 105 seats in Ireland promising to use ...”

“... that the words ‘Death is nothing but eternal sleep’ should be posted at the gates of all French cemeteries, dropped too, but stayed in one piece. I could have applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for money to buy a couple of teacups and a new Robespierre, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Around the motel, residential and ...”

“... Soane favoured and in which his annotations flow most freely. In Sicily he and his friends used Patrick Brydone’s Tour through Sicily and Malta, testing the learned author on every point with mischievous good humour. The tempo of these excursions was fairly brisk and Soane’s companions were not of the kind to tolerate delay occasioned by sketching and ...”

“... was open-minded about new inventions, prepared to back them even if they had no naval relevance. Patrick Wright’s fascinating book is a cultural rather than a military history, dwelling on images and impressions of the tank, its impact on the general public, the responses of artists and writers, rather than its evolving strategic role and its ...”

“... pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual foundations of the republic, and renounces religion as undoing the ...”

“... likes photography, but not fashion photography.’ Robin Muir, the curator, and the set designer, Patrick Kinmonth, have no doubt done their best but the Portrait Gallery is an awkward space. From the main corridor and the rooms that usually host the modern part of the NPG’s collection, they’ve created 15 chamberlets, sprouting from two ...”

“... here is not really original – it probably owes a good deal to A High Wind in Jamaica and The French Lieutenant’s Woman – but it is used with an atmosphere and personality all its own. He makes history extremely funny, and true humour always sounds authentic. Young Fleury, the clever young man of fashion from England, who finds himself involved in the ...”

“... summer, I recall, when I read Crime and Punishment, while fishing the Pound Lough with Patrice, my French exchange partner, who pored over thick volumes of Balzac to be ready for school in September. I spend the evening – or part of it – with Himself Alone, and then we all head out for Iggy’s bar; there’s a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home ...”

“... Two days after becoming taoiseach in 1979, for example, Haughey approached the property developer Patrick Gallagher to ask for help in clearing his huge debt with Allied Irish Bank. Gallagher gave him £300,000 out of what he later testified was ‘a sense of duty’. Fianna Fáil politicians were not the only ones involved. In his testimony to the Mahon ...”

“... and his crabbiness that were quoted. ‘More creakings from an old gate’, was his dedication in Patrick Garland’s volume of High Windows and there were the PCs (which were not PC at all) he used to send to Charles Monteith, including one not quoted here or in the Selected Letters. Along with other Faber authors Larkin had been circularised asking what ...”

“... orthodoxy and censoriousness, impartially including ‘Madame Vendler’s Chamber of Horrors’, French theory, and ‘the deformed, uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism’. It opposes them, much less specifically, with what would appear a libertarian, childlike, very late Romantic poetry of ‘the body’, ‘the voice’ and ‘the new ...”

“... if the truth emerged it was a pure windfall; many years were to pass before he decided that the French inquisitorial system was superior. He took up the complex case of Patrick Meehan, gaoled on a murder charge in Scotland and eventually freed with £50,000 compensation, after a direct written approach from Meehan’s ...”