“... Dublin galleries. Cissie married Boss Sinclair, a Dublin antiques dealer and friend of the painter William Orpen; in the early 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Germany, where they dealt in contemporary German art, as well as antiques. Beckett often visited them there and became emotionally involved with their daughter, his first cousin Peggy, who died in 1933 of ...”

“... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...”

“... that point had probably never left Poland, is set in England and reads like a throwback to Conan Doyle and Chesterton. Chain of Chance, written fifteen years later by a worldly author who had dabbled in global culture and whose books had succeeded in the West, is Lem’s best pass at a contemporary novel of the 1970s. It was praised in the New Yorker by John ...”

“... great patriots and the great saints’. When Niall Quinn equalised against the Netherlands, Roddy Doyle recalled: ‘I was glad I was Irish. I’d never felt that way before.’ Ireland made it to the quarter-finals, where they lost to the hosts: by then, buses in Dublin had stopped bothering to run during games, and concerts by Mick Jagger and Prince at ...”