“... Anthologies are powerful things: movements are launched, periods are parcelled up, writers are made and broken. They are, or want to be, the book world’s performative utterances: defining what they claim only to reflect, they make the things they speak of come to pass. But one last fin-de-siécle anthologising project remains: an anthology of anthology introductions ...”

“... and present, matter and spirit – there is also a terminal chasm which cannot be imagined away. ...”

“... before the referendum that ensured the UK’s continuing membership of the European Community; Patrick Wright was researching The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness as the 2016 referendum took the UK out of the European Union. The histories Wright unfolds go far beyond those bookend dates and far beyond Johnson’s bleak last years. The ...”

“... Aweek​ before Christmas in 2010, a young woman called Joanna Yeates disappeared from her home in Bristol. I remember first hearing about it on the car radio, my attention snagged, as it always is when Bristol is on the news, because that’s where I went to school. The fact that Bristol is a big place has never prevented me thinking I know it well, but it was when the reporter mentioned Clifton that I was reeled in ...”

“... had a swim, eaten your moules-frites and seen the castle’s illuminations (introduced by Patrick Adam, Guy’s son and my oldest childhood companion), you can go and find out about the factory and its workers. The map showing the factory’s international exports gave me vertigo when I first saw it: it looked like the flight routes of a global ...”

“... this we spoke above their heads and through this frightful din.’A Letter to the Dead, edited by Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye, is a new edition of Roberts’s Collected Poems; the first was published in 2005, ten years after her death, at which point her work had been out of print for decades. (There was an earlier attempt to put out a ...”

“... says. The view from Belgium is that the only place that isn’t Brexit-proof is Britain itself. Patrick McGuinness BulgariaSince the two most pressing issues for Bulgarians – EU funding and citizens’ rights – were by and large ironed out by the time of the European Commission meeting last March, Brexit news has mostly been light relief in the ...”

“... literary works in prose, which are in some relation to an older metrical tradition of tale cycles. Patrick McGuinness offers a few examples of late medieval knockabout, from the taproom end of the spectrum: fabliaux largely fixated on the battle of the sexes: conjugal romps, bed-switches, husband murder. So, a dullard gets married with no knowledge of the ...”

“... seen to encapsulate, or express, a nation drunk on its own mythology and self-satisfaction; or, as Patrick McGuinness memorably put it in the LRB of 3 January, one ‘high on its own supply’. We have been told that Britain – for which read England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst offenders, Michael Gove ...”

“... raises intriguing questions about how the Northern Ireland peace process got underway.* ‘Martin McGuinness,’ Powell writes, ‘still denies sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government and the ...”

“... or continue as a front for the IRA. Ignoring renewed protestations from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that Sinn Fein is separate from the IRA, that it is a political party with a democratic mandate from its voters, most politicians and observers have, like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn Fein/IRA. They do ...”

“... Can we imagine either sentiment being expressed at Heathrow airport? The poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People’s Countries (itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is half-Irish and half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his ...”

“... of the background to the current state of the IRA is knowledgeably sketched by Eamonn Mallie and Patrick Bishop. Anyone looking for startling new disclosures will be disappointed, but theirs is a solid, lucidly written account. Their judgments are shrewd and unsentimental and their analysis of the IRA of the Sixties acute. But their coverage of a number of ...”

“... Duddy was primarily responsible for the message of February 1993, purportedly from Martin McGuinness: ‘The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.’ This fake message ‘broke the logjam’, not least because it ‘echoed’ a very recent speech made by McGuinness.The back-channel ...”

“... up for direct discussion between the British Government and the Republican leadership. As Martin McGuinness put it in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of ...”