“... messing about, was looked into by the Wolfenden Committee, and the eminent gay eye surgeon Patrick Trevor-Roper refuted it trenchantly as ‘totally devoid of any truth’.The bishop of Rochester, in the Lords debate on the Wolfenden report, was having none of this. It grows wearisome typing out this stuff, but I’ll give a flavour of his pitch:There ...”

“... there are echoes in works by Carleton and Yeats, but the two most recent works which refer to it, Patrick Kavanagh’s long poem ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942) and Tom Murphy’s play Famine (1968), are much more concerned with the contemporary world, with the spiritual and emotional famine of their own times, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, even though ...”

“... start draining the land for ploughing. The only way he could be stopped was by a direct order from Patrick Jenkin, the environment secretary. Cabinet papers released recently show a furious squabble between Jenkin and his counterpart at the Ministry of Agriculture, Michael Jopling. Jenkin wanted to make the order, rather than lose part of the ‘traditional ...”

“... Leo Beegan met another stonecutter about his own age, Willie Pearse. Willie and his older brother, Patrick, both of whom were executed for their part in the Easter Rising, were the sons of a monumental stonemason. Pearse’s ecclesiastical architecture and stonemasonry business was on Great Brunswick Street in the centre of Dublin, round the back of Trinity ...”