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“... These are the just Who kill unjustly men they call unjust. These are the pure in heart Who see God smeared in excrement on walls. These are the patriots Who starve to give the ravening media food. These are the martyrs Who die for a future buried in the past. These are the sacrifice A word imprisoned and a word could save ...”

“...                       All the words I need               Stored like seed in a pyramid To bring back from the dead your living shade   Lie coffined in this thing of wood you made            Of solid pine mortised and glued                 Not long before you died.                  Words you’ll never read         Are good for nothing but to spread Your greater love of craft in word and deed A gift to make your friends’ desires succeed         While inwardly with pain you bled              To keep your own pride hid ...”

“... Reflections of a spotlit mirror-ball, Casting a light net over a pearl pond In oval orbits, magnify my haul Of small fry at a disco, coiled in sound. On anti-clockwise tracks, all shod with steel, Initiates feel exalted; starlets glide To cut more ice with convoluted skill Practising tricks that lure them to backslide. Their figure-carving feet have chased my skin With puckish onslaught ...”

“... In his budget last month George Osborne announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary it will benefit from a special tax rate of just 5.75 per cent of the resulting profits. The rate is exceptionally low: the same activity undertaken in the UK is taxed at 23 per cent. It is a change that will delight corporate tax avoiders everywhere: the UK will now condone the use of tax havens in locations such as the Cayman Islands, Jersey and the Isle of Man ...”

“... this me? The fields are mined and the night is long; Stick with me when the shooting starts. Richard Murphy is not a reckless poet. Those who rate him surely rate him much too highly. Ted Hughes compliments him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and ...”

“... spy ring, who was bailed in Cyprus and then disappeared – was overheard telling the complaining Richard Murphy (né Vladimir Guryev), ‘Well, I’m so happy I’m not your handler,’ before reluctantly giving him his $40,000 in cash, is taken as evidence that their paymasters thought they were a bunch of losers. The international TV channel Russia ...”

“... substantial separate memoirs printed at the back of the book, by Lucas Myers, Dido Merwin and Richard Murphy. These are drawn on in the book by Stevenson, certainly, but their main force is to act as coda or epilogue, three discrete but linked addenda, all of them emphasising the role of Sylvia Plath as aggressor and catalyst, and of Ted and Olwyn ...”

“... Hare’ and ‘Letter from a Far Country’, where much is said by leaving the rest unsaid. Richard Murphy, too, leaves a good deal unsaid. The price of stone is high, apparently, but he hasn’t computed it in detail; we are meant to leap from one assessment to the next. To begin with, it is the price of trying to build a house in granite, and ...”

“... is distinct from genetic inheritance: but when Murray finds a Celt in, of all Irish poets, Richard Murphy, he has ignored all the evidence of miscegenation, literal and metaphoric, through the centuries – evidence scrupulously marshalled in Murphy’s own poems. If ‘this war has now been won’, it is a ...”

“... to enrich another. ‘Rapparees, white-boys, volunteers, ribbonmen ...’: so runs a line in Richard Murphy’s poem ‘Green Martyrs’, one of Kinsella’s choices, naming bands of disaffected countrymen from the 17th century to the 19th, and getting the fullest flavour from these allusions; in a similar way, the phrase ‘hedge school’, with ...”

“... hoping to find a house where she could spend the winter (their difficult stay is recounted by Richard Murphy in his autobiography The Kick). Hughes’s letters appear cheerful and engaged and free of guilt. At this time, curiously, he concocts a plan to send poems out under one or two pseudonyms. He wants to invent a rival poet, ‘or perhaps ...”

“... out for their quintessentially Post-Modern character. One was the fall of a Tory junior minister, Richard Spring, exposed by your old friends at the News of the World for taking part in a three-in-a-bed sex session. This was a political ‘event’ supposedly ‘reported’ by newspapers and television. But the event itself occurred only in order to be ...”

“... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...”

“... The Christodora​ of Tim Murphy’s novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the area had become known as the East Village, and the building had come down in the world. After a fire it was refurbished and turned into a condominium, in which Steven Traum, an urban planner, bought an apartment, using it as office space while he continued to live on the Upper East Side ...”

“... These MPs had ‘declared war on the membership’ (‘Yes! Yes!’ shouted the woman next to me). Richard Burgon MP talked about the ‘parliamentary bullies’ who wanted to drive Labour members to ‘turn their backs on anti-austerity’ and warned that ‘socialists don’t give in to threats.’ At least twice, members of the audience shouted ...”