“... such perceptions. After the flight to the Continent in 1607 of the harassed Gaelic earls – Hugh O’Neill, Second Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, First Earl of Tyrconnell, along with Cúchonnacht Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh – the Plantation of 1609 was designed to bring civility to these rude parts. The new king, James VI and I, had already attempted ...”

“... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...”

“... When corporate scandals first hit the headlines early in 2002, the US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attributed them to the immorality of a ‘small number’ of miscreants. Apparently he’d been misinformed. The rapacious practices of these executives and firms – whether or not technically illegal – are typical of, and endemic to, corporate ...”

“... someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact. Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger: Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the ...”

“... that the poetry remains in a wholly incongruous Yeatsian world of dreams and swans; and as Michael O’Neill, the best champion of Spender’s poetry, once pointed out, ‘often’ isn’t exactly the register of Utopia. Spender’s most wilfully committed poems frequently muff their rhetorical aplomb like this, and it always works to their advantage. ‘That ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it ...”

“... Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street. She was a witty woman and she liked a laugh.’ When Terence O’Neill resigned as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969 he admitted that he had failed ‘to break the chains of ancient hatreds’. Ian Paisley was on the rise, stirring up fear and bigotry among the Protestant working classes. The McConville children ...”

“... sub-state; the counterfactual fantasy of Ireland’s future under the Third Reich awaits its Robert Harris, but there is plenty of material to hand. Bew needed a volume, not a chapter, for the story of the two Irelands between 1923 and 1966, and much goes unavoidably missing, including the resistant strains of Irish liberalism and dissidence which ...”