“... Indeed, its very legitimacy is at issue. The grief of the two boys’ bereaved families – Martin Brown’s and Brian Howe’s – weighs heavily against what good this book might do. Sereny’s second examination of this crime must therefore be established as an irrefutable necessity. Any failure here may bring into ...”

“... At the time of the Wessex computer scandal, he said, Mrs Currie’s husband Ray and his brother Brian were senior executives at Arthur Andersen. Mrs Currie was incensed by this reference, and complained of misuse of Parliamentary privilege. When I asked her whether the Secretary of State had given a misleading reply very much to the advantage of Arthur ...”

“... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... months after Gysin’s arrival. The future artist finessed his birth certificate: John Clifford Brian of the Thames Valley became Brion of everywhere. The Interzone of Tangier was the ideal clinic for skin-shedding transformation. Gysin emerged as an Orwellian on psilocybin; he sampled and promoted every available system of control. The Process is saturated ...”

“... 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 ...”