“... average. The ‘not’ factor explained things like de Valera’s extraordinary speech on St Patrick’s Day in 1943. He said that Ireland would be a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the rompings of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and ...”

“... Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966. Crossman’s predecessor, Kenneth Robinson, had appointed Howe to chair an inquiry into scandalous allegations, made in the News of thr World, of cruelty, torture and theft at Ely Hospital, a psychiatric institution near Cardiff. Howe’s final report had been submitted in September 1968, a month ...”

“... the few politicians outside Ulster who resigned in protest at this procedure, one was Senator Mary Robinson and another was the late Ian Gow. It would have been a notable act of statesmanship on FitzGerald’s part if he had refrained from consulting the leaders of one of the Northern Ireland parties so long as the others were being kept in the dark. As for ...”

“... Sambo and Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair, Camus’s Algerian victim in The Stranger, the boy who saves Robinson Crusoe but whom Crusoe sells at the first opportunity. ‘We were trained to remove or skirt our presence,’ she writes, ‘or to observe that presence as something like background.’Brand’s inquiry into ‘the literary substance of which I am made ...”

“... a pronounced theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in ...”

“... Independence and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests ...”

“... the attention, an obsession with fashion detail the like of which we haven’t seen since Patrick Bateman was looking out his tie in American Psycho, and, then, of course, there’s the friends. Lulu has more than your average head for vertiginous name-dropping: it’s Elton this and John Lennon that, insecurity all the way, but this doesn’t stop ...”

“... of guilty of preaching only. Mr Bushel was directly bullied by the whole bench: Alderman Sir J. Robinson: I tell you, you deserve to be indicted more than any man that hath been brought to the bar this day ... Mr Justice May: Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ... The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a mark on you ... The Mayor: I will ...”

“... is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”

“... critically we are stitched into the particulars of the places where we choose to make our home. Patrick Keiller, a scrupulous observer from the misted windows of trains, added the Nine Elms Coal Hopper to his album of found architecture. The site was demolished in the winter of 1979-80, before being squatted by a car breaker. The Hopper lives on in ...”

“... changed, changed utterly.’ Later, as the fields rolled by, I asked him if he had known Patrick Kavanagh: ‘I only spent one afternoon with him,’ he said, ‘and I felt lucky to get out alive. I remember I asked him if he liked Thomas Hardy’s poems and of course he took that to be a kind of insult, as if I was asking a country poet if he liked ...”

“... scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its ...”

“... there are echoes in works by Carleton and Yeats, but the two most recent works which refer to it, Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942) and Tom Murphy’s play Famine (1968), are much more concerned with the contemporary world, with the spiritual and emotional famine of their own times, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, even though ...”