“... whereas Cavan and even Monaghan have a less decided orientation. I cannot, for example, think of Patrick Kavanagh as a Northern writer, any more than I would wish to allocate Peadar O’Donnell to the South.’ Donegal is part of the North, yes, but it’s also the place many Northerners go to escape from ‘Norn Ireland’, as we sometimes call ...”

“... head. I had plaster-of-Paris bas-reliefs of Robespierre and Saint-Just hanging on the wall. At a shock of 7.1 on the Richter scale Robespierre, who believed in the Supreme Being, plunged from the wall. Saint-Just, who probably agreed with Fouché that the words ‘Death is nothing but eternal sleep’ should be ...”

“... out of the collapsed company in the years since 2000. To many viewers, Fuld also looked like what Wall Street would look like if it allowed its mask to slip: arrogant, furious at criticism and perceived slights, and so far gone in its own sense of embattled entitlement that it seemed to have lost touch with reality. The glimpses of Fuld in the riveting BBC ...”

“... ability to use smart writing to make a teen plot seem a true account of the place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give their ...”

“... and almost all passengers are on deck at once and through gaps in the Antarctic fog they see a wall of ice running north and south out of sight, rising as much as 200 feet; and as they watch great masses the size of the ship fall from the precipice. There is a heavy sea, made worse, more irregular, by the ice, and a fairly strong wind. Anderson sets all ...”

“... in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, and he performs the same manoeuvre: ‘Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the area pavement and ...”

“... strict requirements contrast strongly with the sweeping rhetoric of the rest of the convention. As Patrick O’Keefe has shown, this formulation was insisted on by the US delegation, which refused to sign unless it was drafted to their satisfaction. None of this is mentioned by Cuno. In any case, the real significance of the Unesco convention is that it shows ...”

“... pregnant Irish possibilities as sectarian violence, Franco-Irish relations, the heroic figure of Patrick Sarsfield, and an act of treachery which would almost have satisfied Joyce. If the subject itself did some of the work for him, however, this is not to depreciate his acumen in discovering it or the delicacy of his manipulation of it into a poem-sequence ...”

“... the French army surgeon Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran; a role for the mosquito was suggested by Patrick Manson’s studies, in China, of another mosquito-borne disease, elephantiasis; and Ronald Ross, a British army surgeon, first demonstrated the presence of the parasites in the stomach wall of mosquitoes that had fed on ...”

“... says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our houses. One of us must leave. I have a houseful of books; he has an umbrella and a revolver.’ Seasoned readers of Muldoon know all about trying to see through inscrutable partitions: for most of his career he has resisted the temptation ...”

“... the easel and stretched canvas, Bonnard would hang a large piece of canvas across the main wall of his studio and work on several paintings at once, extending or cropping across the space as he painted. ‘I don’t like to paint in grand rooms,’ he wrote, ‘they intimidate me.’ In paintings like Coffee one has the sense that he wants to show us a ...”

“... its ‘geotechnic’ successor (in which technology would enhance society and the environment). Patrick Geddes had predicted this in the 1890s, along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish ...”

“... should be linked only with vocal numbers. I was after something that bit classier. My producer, Patrick Garland, suggested filming poems, gave me The Less Deceived, and I read ‘I remember, I remember’. I think I had realised by then that to write one doesn’t need credentials, but I must be the only one of his readers who came to Larkin as an ...”

“... known as Máméan (the Pass of the Birds) that pilgrims still use on the way to the well of St Patrick. Individual graves are built up with large stones, for the length of the body beneath, and there are no crosses to be seen. The bodies of infants were buried by a father or an uncle, often at night. The scant ritual and the isolation of the setting is ...”

“... meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in pending court cases. These eruptions of breaking news are not only possible but certain to occur, because Trump comports himself not as a president or ...”