“... but was grounded in his hard upbringing in the Bogside. He put Derry into Derrida and worked with Edward Said. That Ireland was a colonial, and postcolonial, country became a given of Field Day, the theatre company and cultural powerhouse driven by his directorship. Whether his focus was on the 6, the 26 or the 32 counties, Deane was never an ...”

“... been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests to be ...”

“... given a white piano for her birthday: she sits on it and is wheeled round the room by a crowd of young men in dinner jackets who are supposedly students at an all-male college. Walters himself dances with Garland as she spins round the room with a Ginger Rogers-ish velocity and style. Her dress is floor-length and fitted down to the hips, with embroidery ...”

“... would have blown itself apart before any appreciable thermonuclear processes were initiated. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, émigré scientists from Hungary and Poland respectively, who were working at Los Alamos, found an ingenious solution in 1951. As part of his work on improved fission weapons Ulam had suggested a two-stage fission design. Teller ...”

“... marcasite egg through the window of a lover who had betrayed her, ‘imagining the neatness of his young girl’s cunt’, carving ‘anagrams of her rival’s name on her arm’?The whole island sparkles like a dragonfly’s skin. A childish conviction grows in her: things in this world are made to fit other things. She finds notes in curly handwriting ...”

“... pacts like Nato, or indeed for treaties of any kind. ‘Treaties,’ he famously said, ‘are like young girls and roses; they last as long as they last.’ More than a hint of Donald Trump in all this. He actually wanted World War Two to go on longer, so that the rapidly growing Free French forces could earn a greater share of the glory. The sacred egoism of ...”

“... High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap hotels’), the London Baedeker, Cooper’s The Prairie and Hamlet’s ‘overwhelming question’ – ‘“To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Perhaps also ...”

“... poet, a Republican refugee and future Nobel winner, had made seemingly extravagant claims about young Lezama’s poetry. If he wanted to see his poems published, Lezama (or his patrons) had to pay for it. It was a flagrant literary mugging: your money or your silence. For Lezama, as for most Cuban writers then, it was a question of perish to publish. Of ...”

“... recurring – to break out of their corner and restore relations with the United States. Women and young people, with their vigils for the American dead, express both an ardent sympathy for a loss they comprehend and an intense frustration with the stale taboos of a superannuated revolutionary culture. A raw and rattled US has responded with warmth. Iran, the ...”

“... difference. ‘Maam can borrow up to six books.’ ‘Six? Heavens!’ Meanwhile the ginger-haired young man had made his choice and given his book to the librarian to stamp. Still playing for time the Queen picked it up. ‘What have you chosen, Mr Seakins?’ expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it ...”

“... it was perfectly all right for Wednesbury Corporation to use its cinema licensing powers to stop young people going to the pictures on Sundays? Not one of these decisions, each of them affecting what we would recognise now as fundamental human rights, is intelligible today except by situating the reasoning of the deciding court in its peculiar time and ...”

“... commission to investigate the ‘commercial prospects’ of the area. The Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey sent Casement, who was the Brazilian Consul General, to represent the Foreign Office and investigate the allegations. Thus he was being entertained and looked after by the very people who were perpetrating the atrocities. He had to keep reminding the ...”

“... Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description ‘theatre conferences’ makes these public discussions sound starchier than they were. I was happy to do my bit chairing events in exchange for the train fare and somewhere to sleep ...”

“... an eye or an ear the only human thing left. The one other person in the room with us was a pale young man in a windbreaker, one of the Four Horsemen on his day off. He was busy taking photos of the photos and smiling delightedly.We passed next through a kind of garage with rusty stuff piled all around – shell casings, barbed wire, rotting Sam Browne ...”

“... President of Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, Charles Gavan ...”