“... gave an enormous boost to the confidence and profile of the SNP. More consistent support came from Sean Connery, who struck up a rapport with the SNP’s leader, Alex Salmond. The 1997 general election was another disappointment for the SNP, but it did bring the downfall of the Conservatives, who had blocked all progress on Scottish devolution. With the ...”

“... I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush ...”

“... many of the cases in the Ferns Report are much more severe. The year after I left St Peter’s, Sean Fortune arrived in the seminary. It was alleged to the Ferns Inquiry that he started almost immediately to abuse. He began by fondling boys and masturbating. On one car journey, for example, he asked a boy about a scar on his face and then began ...”

“... one between us, a red Mitsubishi Pajero. In the evening I take Paul to the Bekaa on Arabian Gulf Street for kebabs and salad. There are fat young girls in headscarves there, without men, chatting and smoking hookahs, strawberry-flavour tobacco. Paul’s plan for Phase One of our entry into Iraq is that we should get drunk, and loot the museums.24 ...”

“... the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand his relationship with the woman who had ...”

“... more vivid encounters with severance, whose cause I slowly came to recognise as ‘the war’. Sean Crampton had lost a leg (his prosthetic replacement, which was always attached to the same brown brogue, was placed behind a curtain at night, with only the foot showing, to deter intruders); Roger Lloyd had lost an arm (I initially thought that his huge ...”

“... confirmation of my readings of Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky. Here were drozhki, the horse-drawn street cabs we had read about in Russian novels. Here were filthy peasants in fur-trimmed coats, driving long carts through the muddy streets; here were Russian soldiers singing gypsy chants, bearded beggars (or were they priests?) begging alms outside ruined ...”

“... his face. Thorpe tells us that Macmillan never looked at another woman. He dismisses the claim of Sean O’Casey’s widow (O’Casey was a Macmillan author) to have had an affair with Harold at the time Dorothy first fell for Boothby. Quite out of character, Thorpe argues: Macmillan was straitlaced and not much interested in sex anyway. He was lost for words ...”

“... drove back to where the woman had parked. She pulled out and double-parked a little way down the street while the men put the second car in the space. The first man reached through a hole in the car’s rear arm-rest and tugged out a piece of black flex. It had the safety pin of an explosive device hanging off the end: the tug had started the timer. The men ...”

“... as icicles’. His vision disintegrated, eaten away by herpes; he found himself on Charlotte Street, ‘totally helpless, knowing that if one person walked into me I was finished … I crept along, clinging to the wall, emaciated, etiolated, wrapped up in jackets and scarves and hat and feeling very conspicuously a PWA.’ At the end, he was almost ...”

“... what he taught Yeats about his own attitudes. This, for Yeats, was how drama worked. As he told Sean O’Casey, when rejecting The Silver Tassie for performance at the Abbey, Shakespeare did not fill Hamlet and Lear with his own beliefs, but gave those characters a life that allowed them to educate him. It is crucial, in other words, to triangulate ...”

“... and visits to the British Museum. At the end of February 1917 she met Yeats in St James’s Street in London and they went together to a séance; it seems that the following month he discussed with her the possibility of marriage. He did not then formally propose, but instead left her waiting while he dallied with Maud Gonne and her daughter. When he ...”

“... gathered the commanding officer emerged and told us that another soldier had been killed. Captain Sean Dolan had been on attachment with the Americans and had taken a direct hit from a Taliban mortar. He was a close friend of the commanding officer and Simon Butt, who stood perfectly still at the front of the tent, staring into space. Everyone slowly filed ...”

“... to herself. It was, for Weatherby, her genuine feeling for the down and out, for the wino in the street (this is no metaphor: he describes two encounters), which distinguished her from every other celebrity he had ever met. Most simply, however high her star rose, Monroe never let go of her roots. ‘I would have never thought that our ordinary lives would ...”