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“... to cautious engagement: neither strategy made an impact. Andrew Wilson is more dispassionate than Brian Bennett, who was the UK ambassador in Minsk between 2003 and 2007 and remains angry at what he saw. Wilson devotes the first half of his book to an analysis of Belarusian history since the Middle Ages, charting its course along the winding road to ...”

“... There are​ many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the morning before the nice things press on her: ‘Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice,’ she says in ‘Morning, Noon & Night’. ‘It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn’t, forget about it ...”

“... Hutton named to head the inquiry, correctly predicted the outcome. I looked up the judge, then Sir Brian Hutton, in Kennedy’s Thirty-Six Murders, where he pinpoints one of Hutton’s shortcomings back in 1995 as a failure to notice non sequiturs. There was going to be a lot more of that. Hutton has a look of the actor Bernard Archard, who specialised in ...”

“... instead of shaking hands with Albert Reynolds in Dublin. A lot of them would have preferred, as Brian Hitchen put it in the Sunday Express, that the prisoners had been transferred back to the North in coffins. They like it even less that the breakthrough has come, not from the British, the side that always claimed for itself the distinction of being ...”

“... to screenplays were subject to his approval and subjected to his transmutations. Charles Bennett, for instance, wrote scripts for Hitchcock in England till they both moved to Hollywood just before the War; after a film set in Europe, Foreign Correspondent (1940), he never again worked for Hitchcock, who was turning his attention to American ...”

“... Street to record a voiceover (of my own voice) for an episode of Family Guy, the story being that Brian, the dog, has written a play, premiering at Quahog, which ‘all the playwrights’ (i.e. Yasmina Reza, David Mamet and me) duly go and see – and rubbish. They had first of all asked if they could use me as a cartoon character to which I graciously agreed ...”

“... high explosive. This time British intelligence intercepted the freight. But what about last time? Brian Nelson, a Loyalist terrorist and army double agent, was jailed last year for his part in the murder of several Catholics. In January 1988, while acting as a British intelligence agent – and with the full knowledge of his army and MI5 handlers – Nelson ...”

“... forensic evidence in the Maguire, Ward and Birmingham Six cases with a homicide detective named Brian McCabe (he acts as one of Gerry Adams’s unofficial bodyguards when Adams is in New York). McCabe can tell you, without reference to notes, about the results of the Thin Layer Chromatography test carried on samples taken from Billy Power, and discuss the ...”

“... unionists; the historian Paul (now Lord) Bew; and many writers and journalists, including Ronan Bennett and sometime Ireland correspondents of the Guardian and the Sunday Times. It would be hard to spend even a day in Ireland reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching television without coming across a former Official. The Officials are also ...”

“... of Sinn Fein councillor Bobby Lavery – within twelve months they had also killed his son; Brian Nelson, a British military intelligence agent, described in court by a Colonel J as a ‘hero’, conspired to murder, among others, Belfast city councillor Alex Maskey – that Brian Nelson escaped multiple life ...”

“... it as a great opportunity, and so the production went ahead, with Mona Washbourne, Gemma Jones and Brian Cox in the other parts. I didn’t attend many of the rehearsals. I still wasn’t certain that one should. The question had not arisen in Forty Years On since I was there anyway as a member of the cast. Practices differ. Some playwrights attend the first ...”

“... play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and coloniser will play, the masks ...”

“... Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen – to which his contemporaries Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett were also drawn. The mecca for music students in those days was Stockhausen’s headquarters at Darmstadt, where the ‘Darmstadt Headbangers’, as Tom Lubbock describes them, treated Britten and Shostakovich with derision as traditionalists, and ...”

“... of the DUP and VUPP, formed in 1974, to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement according to which Brian Faulkner, the then-UUP leader, agreed to share power with moderate Nationalists. Faulkner’s compromise was too much for the UUC – the governing body of the UUP. When Faulkner was ditched by the UUC, he took his followers in the UUP and went off to found ...”

“... Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant at Ingleton.‘Hello, Mr Redhead, this is Alan Bennett. I’m wanting some coal.’‘Goodness me! I am consorting with higher beings!’Last time I rang Mr Redhead he said: ‘Well, I don’t care how celebrated you are, you’ll never be a patch on your dad.’ I remind him of this.‘That’s correct and I ...”