“... idealised. It is as full of violence, illusion, futility and sexual frustration as any of Martin McDonagh’s wicked parodies of the traditional Irish play. As the years of prosperity rolled on, some of the more doctrinaire modernisers grew increasingly contemptuous of their own history. The suggestion that aspects of traditional Irish culture were to ...”

“... him by the militantly modern, urban Irish literati, as it is sometimes held against authors like Brian Friel and Seamus Deane. This is because in their case, but not in his, the backward glance to rural Ireland is associated with a currently unfashionable republicanism. On Canaan’s Side is a less impressive piece of fiction than A Long Long Way and The ...”

“... profit out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into ...”

“... other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only Newton’s laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so ...”

“... died out completely. There was never much social comment in Monty Python (until they made Life of Brian), but the (Oxbridge-educated) Not the Nine O’Clock News team at the beginning of the 1980s sometimes aimed for satire, and Armando Iannucci (University College, Oxford) has blazed such a trail through broadcast comedy in recent years that no one would ...”

“... Jackson, a founding member of the project, was vice-president for strategic planning at Lockheed Martin, a staunch lobbyist for Nato expansion in Eastern Europe (a fruitful market for Lockheed products) and head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Another member was Donald Rumsfeld. Reappointed defence secretary by Bush in 2001, Rumsfeld paid ...”

“... were both a few years ahead of him at St Columb’s Catholic Grammar School (where John Hume and Brian Friel had also been pupils), he belonged to the first generation to have access to free secondary schooling after the war. He went to university at Queen’s in Belfast, spent time in London, and by the mid-1960s was back in Derry, fired up by ...”

“... of the DUP and VUPP, formed in 1974, to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement according to which Brian Faulkner, the then-UUP leader, agreed to share power with moderate Nationalists. Faulkner’s compromise was too much for the UUC – the governing body of the UUP. When Faulkner was ditched by the UUC, he took his followers in the UUP and went off to found ...”

“... new here. The book reads like a rushed synopsis of press cuttings, and it rates as a poor third to Martin Dillon’s two excellent accounts, Political Murder in Northern Ireland and The Shankill Butchers. There are many irritating factual errors. Bruce refers to off-duty soldiers from the ‘Royal Irish Rifles’ shooting at members of the Royal Ulster ...”

“... and sinful, they were also deceived about the nature of their gods and their role in the world. Martin of Tours, a charismatic healer and exorcist, insisted on identifying the demons he exorcised as Jupiter or Mercury – the latter, he said, was a source of frequent and special annoyance.Exorcism does present certain theological problems. Some are of ...”

“... fear and voyeurism that keeps us sitting in the darkened cinema. In homage to Powell’s cameo, Martin Scorsese cast himself in a scene in Taxi Driver, playing a voyeur spying on his adulterous wife from Travis Bickle’s cab. ‘You see the woman in the window? Good. I want you to see that woman ’cause that’s my wife. But that’s not my apartment ...”

“... Rights Movement (and Ellison took a dim view of Baldwin’s involvement), just as writers like Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney avoided active involvement in the public life of Northern Ireland after 1972. (‘Forgive my timid, circumspect involvement,’ Heaney was later to write.) But Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the world of ...”

“... a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what they know of the man for whom their school is named. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great ...”

“... of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old boyfriends. But we also think of the places in Britain where the cars were built, places ...”

“... Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister 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 ...”