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“... to Brian Friel, Heaney to Riverdance – is modern Ireland’s most remarkable export. There is a small but impressive film industry known as Paddywood. Artists in Ireland are exempt from income tax on their work, and this respect for the arts goes a long way back: medieval Irish bards were in some ways more powerful than chieftains, and could wither your ...”

“... London​ in the time of Henry VIII had many colourful, even flamboyant, inhabitants. Stephen Vaughan was not one of them. His was a small life, full of frustrations; his chief characteristic was a pragmatic diligence, which gave him a good, if not brilliant, head for business. He was a merchant, a financier, a minor diplomat and an occasional low-grade spy ...”

“... freedom-loving victims of the wicked Sandinistas, armless teenage entrepreneurs who have started small businesses in their spare time while training for the Olympics. This particular visionary wrote to Ronald Reagan that he loved America ‘because we have about two hundred flavours of ice cream’. ‘That’s America,’ the President observed. ‘Everyone ...”

“... With the exception nowadays of a few able solicitors, all judges are drawn from the relatively small barristers’ profession. John Morison and Philip Leith, two Belfast academics, have had a brave go at penetrating and describing in sociological terms the business of advocacy in the United Kingdom – a country containing three separate jurisdictions and ...”

“... as weak, Hollande was suddenly perceived as a strong commander-in-chief (linguistically, it’s a small step from chef d’état to chef de guerre). Abroad, despite offers from Western allies of logistical or humanitarian support (France’s plea for military support from its European allies remains unanswered), many suspected that neocolonial ghosts were ...”

“... Tech, and a hell of an engineer.’) Another relation ventured out west, with his wife and two small children, to try his hand as a pedlar in Wyoming. This was the occasion of the unique return to Lithuania to which I have alluded: after some years in what must have been a singularly raw and difficult environment, the pedlar’s wife, declaring that it was ...”

“... in the press, though it had already sent itself up in its inaugural programme, How to Listen, by Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfell – the first of many satires, including Henry Reed’s high-camp Hilda Tablet comedies and Third Division, the comedy show that turned into the Goons. But mostly the press response was respectful. The social and political ...”

“... Some years ago Stephen King announced that he would put his new book online before publication, for anyone to read freely. His publishers were spitting dollar signs and the fans delighted. In my memory he did as he said, and put the entire book on his website, but the 100,000-or-so words of the manuscript, though all there, were in alphabetical order ...”

“... On the morning of 16 June, in city after city throughout the world, small groups of people will gather to engage in curious rituals. In New York, some fifty people will each pay $25 to breakfast on mutton kidneys and slightly burnt toast. Optional courses will include ‘nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs’ and ‘fried hen-cod’s roe ...”

“... of war, paradoxically, anti-Fascism seemed to recede into the background and become a very small affair. English anti-Fascists were bitter when the proposal put forward by Tom Wintringham, a former International Brigade commander, that the British Army might learn from their experiences in fighting Fascism was ignored by the authorities. When America ...”

“... membership rolls have allowed both of the big national parties to be colonised by relatively small numbers of hard-edged zealots and entryists with … no interest at all in accommodating anyone else.’ He has also added to the text of his lecture on ‘Rights and the Ideal Constitution’: Politics may be a dirty word, but the alternative to it is ...”

“... But the government’s response has been to use the problem as an opportunity to raise the small claims limit, pushing large numbers of people with genuine claims into a situation where they would not be able to recover any legal costs if they won. They have to either muddle through on their own and very possibly lose a sound case or be prepared to ...”

“... awards one to ‘Bosphorus’, himself spelling it ‘Bosporus’, though when the versatile Miss Stephen spells it that way a few pages on, she gets another sic. And with so many of them flying about one can’t help noticing places where they are needed but are absent. Mr Leaska has written a long, informative and devout introduction, filling in much ...”

“... desire to score in argument. ‘His forte was the quick and clever or even clever-clever,’ Stephen Hugh-Jones, a former student, remarks. His old antagonist, Meyer Fortes, the professor of social anthropology at Cambridge, said that Leach had the public schoolboy notion that just by turning an argument on its head you were being original. Leach more or ...”

“... as little as possible, but Wakefield was always one to muck in.’ The patrol could hear bursts of small-arms fire as they made their way along the road. Over the course of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12’ – these were combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us ...”