“... given the primitive acoustic equipment (the original recording was made in 1903), the fabled French actress sounds like Minnie Mouse on speed. She gabbles her way through ‘Oui, Prince, je brûle pour Thésée’ at a mad, cartoonish pace, ’r’s unrolling wildly in every direction. (Watch your head!) The reviewer dotes on her deranged-chipmunk ...”

“... the sense to list) read: ‘Monkeys. Talking Parrots. Regent Pet Stores. Naturalists.’ In 1966 Patrick Garland and I filmed some poems to include in a comedy series we were doing, On the Margin. The standard form of comedy sketch shows then demanded a musical interlude between items, Kathy Kirby, say, or Millicent Martin. Boldly (as we thought) we opted ...”

“... It was under the control of Galway County Council, but operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours, a French order whose mission is to nurse the sick and dying, and who began ministering in Ireland in the mid-19th century. The council made decisions about who entered the home and paid a ‘capitation’ rate for each resident, but the sisters themselves were ...”

“... an impulsive Trump would sometimes take against a good contestant and fire them, upon which, as Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in the New Yorker, ‘editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasise the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an ...”

“... dandy, strolls across the park to his execution. Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close attention from a child protection unit. All very saccharine, morbid and outmoded – until the disregarded and rundown riverscape was ...”

“... Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham ...”

“... she was taken under the wing of an overbearing Irish bus driver known in her autobiography as Patrick Reilly. Reilly wanted a wife. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he assured Frame, ‘that I’m manager material.’ In her opinion, he was ‘yet another reject of a demanding world’. His romantic strategy was ‘never to take your eye off the quarry’. With ...”

“... Leo Beegan met another stonecutter about his own age, Willie Pearse. Willie and his older brother, Patrick, both of whom were executed for their part in the Easter Rising, were the sons of a monumental stonemason. Pearse’s ecclesiastical architecture and stonemasonry business was on Great Brunswick Street in the centre of Dublin, round the back of Trinity ...”

“... invented names whose pay is collected by officers or bureaucrats. I heard Staff Sergeant Craig Patrick, who was training Iraqi troops, say: ‘It’s all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as planned and we’re right on schedule to be out of here. I mean, they can bullshit the American people, but they can’t ...”