“... this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the talk of Scotland being more radical than England and of the nation being predisposed towards left-of-centre redistributive policies, these characteristics have not really manifested themselves in any meaningful ...”

“... Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. McGreevy flits in and out of the lives of ...”

“... the centenary took its gross earnings above two billion dollars. In the movie, the 101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater, who was 17 when she survived the sinking, learns that a 1996 expedition had been looking for a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship but found instead a sketch of a young woman wearing it. She contacts the ...”

“... but none in a way that is easy to interpret. Perhaps the very act of bombing from a plane – what Richard Eberhart called ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, the gap between, in J.M. Synge’s phrase, ‘a gallous story and a dirty deed’ – made it impossible for anyone, including Yeats in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a poem which seems to ...”

“... followed, he raged. But the agents who got with the programme – the men most like himself – rose fast. None was promoted faster than Clyde Tolson, five years younger than Hoover, who was made assistant director. Tolson was a Missourian who had also gone to George Washington (though pledged a different fraternity); he was better-looking than Hoover, a ...”

“... of Vietnam Syndrome. His ‘theory of the Cold War’ was ‘We win, they lose,’ as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary fringe position in 1964 ...”

“... the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from ...”

“... into a stone representation of an Edwardian photo album, one in which some paper-lace work – a rose in this case – pops out as the book is opened. Here the head from the lower portrait appears again – picture upon picture upon picture – in a framed oval below others which contain images of the faces of his two sisters, almost grown-up, and their ...”

“... the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern counties, and one notional, made up of the 26 remaining counties which had Nationalist majorities. Following de Valera’s ...”

“... acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red rose to Corey, the robber played by Delon, just before he falls into a trap laid by the police. The minimalism of Melville’s films – and their indifference to psychological motivation and melodramatic convention – provoked comment that he was imitating ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... malt appeared. Clackmannanshire declared. Then Orkney. Then the rest. I went to bed about 3 a.m., rose again at six, by which time it was over: 55 per cent of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d ...”

“... the assayer’s department at the US Mint in Philadelphia, beginning on a salary of $5 a day that rose, in nearly thirty years’ service, to only $2500 a year, really did somehow challenge and defeat the crooked umpire (whom the young Pound goes on to suggest might have been bribed), this was very much the exception rather than the rule. Pound’s casually ...”

“... understood the way national security blurs the line between the possible and the actual than Richard Perle. ‘How far Saddam’s gone on the nuclear weapons side I don’t think we really know,’ Perle said on one occasion. ‘My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about ...”