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“... Linnen – argenterie Goods – MSS!!! All!’ When she reached Brussels, she wrote to her brother Charles: ‘Unless some speedy happy turn takes place, in public affairs here, we have lost all we possessed in France.’ There was, from her point of view, a happy turn: the Battle of Waterloo. As before in her life, she was about to become a witness to ...”

“... Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal Father, the ...”

“... This might, of course, be strategic confusion, some reflex habit of legalistic discretion. Robert Murphy’s Smash and Grab gets Jan son’s name and publisher right, and offers an altogether sparkier bibliography, with a list of films as an entertaining extra, and a useful glossary of underworld slang (for aspirant screenwriters trying to knock out an ...”

“... campaign during the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. In the referendum’s aftermath, Jim Murphy, Scottish Labour’s new Catholic leader – and as such the principal political spokesman in Scotland for the Union – denied that he was a unionist. Scottish Labour has not yet recovered from the referendum and is still to find a convincing policy ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... as a figurehead. No more Queens! At the moment, the republican war is being waged against Prince Charles, using Princess Diana as a means and excuse, but that sympathy for a woman is a trumped-up and certainly an interested matter. No woman ought to think for a moment that the republican movement as represented by, for instance, the Sunday Times has any ...”

“... poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family ...”

“... Post Office and measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn’s arse’, as Neary in his novel Murphy wished to engage with the arse of the statue of Cúchulainn, the ancient Irish hero, patron saint of pure ignorance and crass violence, by banging his head against it. The need to buy a stamp or a TV licence or fill in a form is often too pressing, the ...”

“... in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean War quickie narrated by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both the status of the FBI and the date, 22 July 1934, by getting himself shot to pieces emerging from the Biograph in Chicago, after watching Clark Gable play an amiable ...”

“... who would be able to prove or disprove the story? Welles’s first wife, Virginia, later married Charles Lederer, the scriptwriter nephew of the mistress, Marion Davies. The couple spent a lot of time at Hearst’s castle, San Simeon. Herman Mankiewicz, who shared the script credit on Kane (rightly, according to both books), and who so feared that Welles ...”

“... 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 two’, who will ...”

“... he was ‘obviously ill’ but not sectionable, tried to arrange for a psychiatrist from St Charles’ Hospital in North Kensington to do a domiciliary visit. Two doctors told the Inquiry that they had tried and failed to see Clunis. They were to return on 9 June. On 6 June, however, all the tenants were told that they were going to be rehoused because ...”

“... of madness or that kind of egotism or that kind of talent . . . it’s not the madness of Audie Murphy . . . The high command wants him to kill as many people as possible but they don’t want him to broadcast the fact. Instead of fighting it secretly behind closed doors, which is the way we fought the war in Cambodia . . . he feels that it should be known ...”

“... did not fit easily into the social mould of a Yale man,’ as his college friend Gerald Murphy put it, by the end of four years his music had engineered a place for him at the hot centre of campus life: he was elected to exclusive clubs and secret societies (the Pundits, Scroll and Key) as well as to the Whiffenpoofs, the most prestigious acapella ...”

“... At the military academy in Saint-Cyr, which he entered in 1908, Charles de Gaulle was known as ‘the great asparagus’. But aside from the fact that he stood six feet four in his socks it was his character that drew attention: he was rebellious yet aloof, sceptical yet sure of himself. Not everyone admired his manner and his height could be a nuisance ...”