“... were glittering as I made my way down to the church. I hadn’t taken in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged ...”

“... architect, a designer of domes, he settled in Winchester, where he was visited by the journalist Brian Viner. Viner discovered that his luncheon companion was in the grip of ‘paranoid delusions’. ‘He thinks,’ Viner wrote, ‘that the British secret service, and possibly the CIA too, tapped his phone, worried by his interest in the assassination of ...”

“... Europe to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I sit on a sofa with Alan ...”

“... both stood smoking outside the portals of the library looking at the Daíl car park, remarked that Brian Lenihan, then a prominent politician, had hair that seemed to have been actually, by some ancient process, corrugated; or how strange it is, now that I think about it, that in 1978 when I came back from Spain, there was only one Mediterranean coffee-making ...”