“... impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s (Sergei, that is) amnesia, both recently made famous again by Oliver Sacks; Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, just to bring us right up to the mad cow. (No woman – at least at this level – seems to have had anything named after her.) A name announces only the dénouement, however: it does not convey the extraordinary ...”

“... to become civilised.’ In his essay on Irish emigration in the book commissioned by de Valera, Oliver MacDonagh states that two million people left Ireland permanently during the decade 1845 to 1855. ‘The cottier class had virtually disappeared. The number of holdings under one acre had dropped from 134,000 to 36,000 ... the number of persons per square ...”