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“... too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Apocalypse ...”

“... state public employees, Walker responded with sycophantic alacrity to a prank call placed by Ian Murphy, a reporter for the Buffalo Beast, who convinced Walker that he was David Koch, the mega-billionaire funder of the Tea Party. The faux-Koch suggested an outlandish series of Nixonian stunts to attack the unions, including the planting of pro-Walker double ...”

“... against the rain, and Rome seemed a place not of eternities but of passing trade. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor entered the restaurant in his civilian uniform of open-necked shirt and windcheater, smiling to the waiters and taking his usual table. I didn’t approach him, but took time to notice the high-spiritedness of his friends, happy to be in the ...”

“... had to be managed as best they could.‘Any fool can turn the blind eye,’ Samuel Beckett says in Murphy (1938), a novel set in part in the Bethlem Royal Hospital near Croydon. The hospital had recently transferred to an airy new site in Beckenham when Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson got a job there as a house physician in 1935. ...”

“... flash and is put in perspective by the next item, a much more extensive piece about how Eddie Murphy invited a transvestite prostitute into his car with a view to putting him/her on the right road.3 May. To the Chicago Art Institute, a relatively modest museum but with superb paintings. It’s Saturday and very busy so I confine myself to rooms with ...”

“... dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to ...”

“... taking time off from a court battle with Hackney Council over the treatment by the developers Murphy of the last rind of Georgian façades on Dalston Lane, blew his saxophone from the pit in feisty lament. He’d told us earlier: ‘The conservation plan, now, is to demolish them all. To create a tabula rasa. A year zero solution. After demolition the ...”

“... summer of 1919 there, Yeats drew an idyllic picture for his father. ‘It may well be,’ William Murphy later wrote in his biography of Yeats’s father, ‘that one of the happiest days of his life was 16 July 1919. Fishing in the stream by the tower, with George sewing and “Anne lying wide awake in her 17th-century cradle”, he saw an otter chasing a ...”

“... travelled from there into the common areas and the stairwell. In Flat 111 on the 14th floor, Denis Murphy, 56, dialled 999 and was told to stay inside his flat and that firefighters would soon reach him. He called his brother at 1.30 and left a message saying there was black smoke everywhere. People could have made for the stairs at that point, but they were ...”