“... by a poet called Donagh MacDonagh, otherwise known as the national orphan, since his father, Thomas MacDonagh, had been executed by the British for his part in the 1916 Rebellion. Later O’Brien paid a visit to Joyce’s father, then living in Drumcondra, where the best English is spoken, who was partly bedridden and expressed the view that his son ...”

“... ready to return to Dublin and the humblest employment; but once back home, he writes to his friend Thomas McGreevy dismissing the problem with much self-conscious wordplay, going on to reflect at length on poetry and painting. One of the high points of the first volume is an unusually candid letter to McGreevy in 1935 in which Beckett, now in Jungian analysis ...”

“... to the microphone of a loudspeaker. Hamas’s victory was greeted with a diplomatic boycott by the powers that had urged democracy on the Palestinian people, along with efforts to ‘bolster’ Abbas and, ultimately, to foment civil war between Hamas and Fatah. The West responded this way to the elected government of Hamas because it refuses to renounce ...”

“... of souvenirs, ‘snapshots’, that his art had allegedly become. If the ‘progress of his powers’ as an artist – Wordsworth’s words for what is recorded in The Prelude – may be thought to have taken these turns, the progress of Lowell’s life brought hard work, fame, and an alternation of domesticity and escape. The breakdowns were for long ...”

“... the wars between Connaught and Ulster, translated by Lady Gregory in 1902 and decades later by Thomas Kinsella, which became an Iliad for independent Ireland. It is given a place of honour at the start of The Field Day Anthology. As a vision of the four green fields, however, it is divisive and gory. Was Kinsella anticipating the Troubles when he published ...”

“... to record the aesthetic’. In his seventies he was still taking up an old worry about his own powers of seeing. In a note ‘inspired’ by Woolf’s posthumous A Writer’s Diary, he laments: ‘The beauties the beauties the things I let go by.’ No one should approach Forster’s diaries, now published in full for the first time, with any expectation ...”

“... and virtually untouchable acquis, and a decreasing connection to public feeling, was expanding its powers at the expense of national parliaments. The truth was that ‘the EU began as an oligarchy, it continues oligarchic, and the oligarchs see no reason to alter their practices or their ambitions. No previous empire I can think of, certainly not that of the ...”

“... damaging yourself.’Suppose a philosopher, in her middle forties, is working at the height of her powers, with The Broken Middle (1992), the book she saw as her greatest achievement, just published. In February 1993, she delivers a triumphant inaugural lecture, ‘Athens and Jerusalem – A Tale of Three Cities’, at the University of Warwick, where she has ...”

“... to her husband Henry, owner of Time magazine. ‘Probably both.’ Hearing his plans, Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the grandly-named US Asiatic Fleet, wrote to his wife: ‘Douglas is, I think, no longer altogether sane ... he may not have been for a long time.’ When Japan attacked the Philippines, four hours after Pearl Harbor, the sceptics were ...”

“... decided to send a delegation to Russia to seek formal recognition. (It was also suggested that Thomas Johnston, leader of the Labour Party, should be one of its members.) The initial proposal had come from de Valera, writing to Griffith from Washington and suggesting that McCartan go to Russia as a delegate from the Dáil. The idea was to obtain ...”

“... Tibbald or Tibbles, inherited a name that just happened to be as innocently embarrassing as, say, Thomas Kitten. The name Theobald/Tibbald was there; Pope didn’t put it there. What is difficult about Pope is not his fantasy but his facts. The poet might have told Mack that no ‘translation’ had taken place, that not he but Nature had made ...”

“... massacres of 1994: she downplayed the genocidal aspect in favour of ‘the role played by outside powers’, and accused ‘aid agencies’ of ‘building prisons’ instead of bringing in food and medical help. Aid agencies, unsurprisingly, objected; Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan, did some digging and discovered that Foster is really Fiona Fox. Her ...”

“... is established as a voice – and the commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible ...”

“... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...”

“... lies over north Norfolk. Eleven miles to the north of Agnew’s house is Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, still owns farmland on the scale of his eponymous Georgian ancestor, the agricultural reformer Coke of Norfolk. Last year the Holkham Farming Company received £183,000 in subsidies; another Holkham enterprise, Holkham Nature ...”