“... twenty-one years, a fine girl but a bleeder, and her young cousin husband her uncle Jack’s son Sean aged twenty-one years, a sterling fellow but a bleeder too … By attributing haemophilia to a woman (a footnote tells the reader that this condition is ‘an exclusively male disorder. But not in this work’), Beckett asserts the same authorial ...”

“... as the public mood changes. No honeymoon lasts for long. As the American political commentator Sean Trende likes to point out, if the Democrats could recover after being on the wrong side of the bloodiest civil war in history, parties can come back from just about anything. How bad would things have to get for Corbyn to stand a chance of winning a general ...”

“... in the Kremlin down to the ‘typical Russian lack of culture’ of the man in the street. On learning that Andrei lived in New York, they start asking about ‘the art galleries and restaurants they knew there, which I had never been to or even heard of’. It is a revelation: ‘So these were the Russian liberals who opposed the Putin ...”

“... cam jumps and spins, he rights himself and chases after the car, which comes to a stop down the street with a sickening noise as it hits a telephone pole. In the front seat, Samuel DuBose is dead. The Cincinnati video is one of more than twenty visual records of police violence against black men, most of them unarmed, that have surfaced in the last three ...”

“... weapons, and had this to say about the movie High Noon in a February 2002 article for the Wall Street Journal: Cowboys are normal people – some are impulsive, some are loners, some are neither. But what [the Europeans] are rejecting is not a modern-day cowboy, but rather a modern-day marshal, and marshals are different. They and their equivalents, such ...”

“... Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ‘Harpie’ Hargan, the Derry football hero. The TV wasn’t there, we thought wistfully, to cover us, or the long-running story that had brought us back to Northern Ireland after thirty years: the Inquiry into the fatal shooting of 14 unarmed civil rights ...”

“... sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street’. Though he had never been a spy, Deighton drew on his own experiences for The Ipcress File, which is part of what makes the world he describes so convincing (he saved his scuba-diving training in the RAF for Horse under Water). While studying at St ...”

“... of the Troubles in 1969 there had been a co-operative choreography of protests and policing at street level between British officialdom and the IRA, in the interests of minimising bloodshed and disorder. On rare occasions collusion of this sort was authorised from the top of the British government. In July 1972 the IRA was given advance notice of Operation ...”

“... for its critical gusto and its sense that he had really enjoyed the novels (by a sweet irony, Sean Connery would later take the lead in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film of The Name of the Rose). But he maintained, nonetheless, a high-minded refusal to make exaggerated claims for them, dismissing the Bond canon, finally, as ‘a museum of déjà vu, a recital ...”

“... of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of ...”

“... and, through the car’s rear window, see the pale green two-storey house receding down the quiet street. Then, unpredictably, we cut to a shot from inside the empty house: through the middle of three tall bay windows, past a green tree overhanging the road, the car can be seen disappearing into the distance. The home returns the mother’s gaze; in a kind of ...”

“... too funky for its clean earlobes was re-synthesised by the Beatles and ricocheted out of Matthew Street and the Reeperbahn to recapture Teensville USA. J.W. Lennon, grammar-school dissident and art-school yobbo, used the idiom of rock and roll to charm London into cultural submission, drive Britain half-crazy with excitement and enchant the world. But then ...”

“... with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time. He made a joke about it, which she considered in poor taste and there was a subsequent cooling in their relationship. It was to be his last visit to her house and the first change of partners in a frantic ...”

“... Pineapple Express. In the former, directed by Van Sant, Franco gave a nicely unshowy turn opposite Sean Penn’s brilliant performance as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold major public office in America. Franco’s deadpan sincerity was very funny in Pineapple Express, a stoner action-comedy produced by Judd Apatow, who got Franco’s career ...”

“... illusions were quickly shattered. In the event, Ireland’s first representatives in Paris were Sean T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy. O’Kelly, who had been a member of Dublin Corporation for many years, represented the Dáil Government in Paris from 1919 until his dismissal in 1922, but also spent a brief period in Rome in the summer of 1920. He was ...”