“... Netherne (with nearly one thousand patients in 1922), you could see the Victorian water tower of Cane Hill Hospital to the north (with approximately two thousand patients), and to the east the towers of what was known locally as Caterham Subnormality, full to bursting with more than two thousand mentally disabled inpatients when my teenage grandmother ...”

“... a better fit. B. is solicitous if not saintly around my mother. Helps her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash at Yale ...”

“... this haunting is clamant throughout Pearse’s later speeches: he seems to see Emmet tapping his cane along the Rathfarnham roads … or standing on a scaffold before a silent Dublin crowd.’ Whereas in the old school Pearse had spoken of ancient heroes, in the new school, Ryan noted, ‘he spoke oftener to his boys of past efforts to gain Irish ...”