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“... that used to threaten the ‘axis of evil’. The idea of global civil society, as Mary Kaldor and John Keane both suggest, also belongs to the 1990s. They argue that civil society is no longer confined to territorial borders – Kaldor refers to ‘the domestication of the international’ – and seek to make sense of, and conceptualise, the growing ...”

“... his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’? In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known ...”

“... of wider perspectives and responsibilities. If there were any doubt about that, the publication of Keane (Michael Joseph, £17.99), the autobiography of the Manchester United player, ghost-written by the footballer-turned-journalist Eamon Dunphy, would clear it up. The book has already been all over the newspapers, for a passage concerning ...”

“... Irish, many of them young women. Among its employees was my grandfather Sean (known in Britain as John), who drove a District Line train until ill-health forced him to retire in the 1970s. Irish muscle was most useful to the expanding building trade, reviving the clichéd image of the Irish navvy. The Irish were good workers who took pride in the belief that ...”

“... Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and ...”

“... it is?’ ‘No,’ said the man, and he shook out his newspaper, leaving my father to walk away. John McGahern went to London in 1954 to work for a few months on the building sites: ‘When I walked off the boat at Holyhead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great English writers I had read and studied – I ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”

“... among his many books, seems to give pride of place to a blockbuster history of the Cold War. Dr John Lewis, editor of the Modern Quarterly, so far from being, as Inglis would have it in one of his punchy characterisations, a ‘hard nut’ of the Communist Party, was an ex-Unitarian minister, much given to moral discourse and retaining a distinctly clerical ...”

“... 29 May. Everyone I know is obsessed with Roy Keane’s tournament-ending public diatribe against the Ireland manager, Mick McCarthy. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, having meetings about me? You were a crap player, you are a crap manager. The only reason I have any dealings with you is that somehow you are manager of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt ...”

“... best-seller in America and Ireland. In early autumn the novel was published in Britain, and Molly Keane joined six others on this year’s somewhat extended list of Booker Prize candidates. One might suspect hype in reports of this extraordinary come-back story. But in fact Good Behaviour is as successful a novel as Deutsch’s hand-outs claim it to be. It ...”

“... to go to in the basements and back rooms of North London pubs was an indie guitar group called Keane. One Friday night in the early summer of 2001 at the Monarch on Chalk Farm Road, my girlfriend gave their manager (an ex-boyfriend of hers) a couple of quid for a homemade CD. ‘That’ll be worth a lot of money one day,’ he said. I assumed he was ...”

“... incidents he prefers to gloss over. Ferguson had a share in the horse with the Irish businessman John Magnier, a very wealthy man whose interests (in conjunction with his associate J.P. McManus) ranged from stud farms to currency trading. What started out as a bit of fun turned deadly serious once Rock of Gibraltar began winning race after race, making him ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... his reinstatement on the Navy List is promised. Despite such plots O’Brian’s Aubrey novels, as John Bayley has said in this paper, are ‘emphatically not adventure stories, or the sort of mechanical marine thrillers which sprang up in the wake of C.S. Forester’. For one thing, delicacy and generosity of feeling are constant themes in O’Brian’s ...”

“... it is a history of coercion and control. The figure who emerges from it most strongly is John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin between 1940 and 1972, who stopped Noel Browne, the Minister for Health in 1951, from introducing a health scheme for mothers, thereby bringing down the Government, and who insisted that ...”