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“... When male poets​ have dramatic, bohemian or tragic lives, it is a triumph of consistency; when they have boring ones, it is a triumph of manly compartmentalisation. The rules are different for women: their tragedy and bohemianism must occlude their writing (while also keeping it marketable), and any gift they display for normality – or, worse, happiness – must be proof of the unlivedness of their poetry, its existential insincerity ...”

“... and present, matter and spirit – there is also a terminal chasm which cannot be imagined away. ...”

“... before the referendum that ensured the UK’s continuing membership of the European Community; Patrick Wright was researching The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness as the 2016 referendum took the UK out of the European Union. The histories Wright unfolds go far beyond those bookend dates and far beyond Johnson’s bleak last years. The ...”

“... had a swim, eaten your moules-frites and seen the castle’s illuminations (introduced by Patrick Adam, Guy’s son and my oldest childhood companion), you can go and find out about the factory and its workers. The map showing the factory’s international exports gave me vertigo when I first saw it: it looked like the flight routes of a global ...”

“... says. The view from Belgium is that the only place that isn’t Brexit-proof is Britain itself. Patrick McGuinness BulgariaSince the two most pressing issues for Bulgarians – EU funding and citizens’ rights – were by and large ironed out by the time of the European Commission meeting last March, Brexit news has mostly been light relief in the ...”

“... literary works in prose, which are in some relation to an older metrical tradition of tale cycles. Patrick McGuinness offers a few examples of late medieval knockabout, from the taproom end of the spectrum: fabliaux largely fixated on the battle of the sexes: conjugal romps, bed-switches, husband murder. So, a dullard gets married with no knowledge of the ...”

“... seen to encapsulate, or express, a nation drunk on its own mythology and self-satisfaction; or, as Patrick McGuinness memorably put it in the LRB of 3 January, one ‘high on its own supply’. We have been told that Britain – for which read England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst offenders, Michael Gove ...”

“... raises intriguing questions about how the Northern Ireland peace process got underway.* ‘Martin McGuinness,’ Powell writes, ‘still denies sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government and the ...”

“... or continue as a front for the IRA. Ignoring renewed protestations from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that Sinn Fein is separate from the IRA, that it is a political party with a democratic mandate from its voters, most politicians and observers have, like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn Fein/IRA. They do ...”

“... Can we imagine either sentiment being expressed at Heathrow airport? The poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness, in his forthcoming book Other People’s Countries (itself a rich analysis of home and homelessness; McGuinness is half-Irish and half-Belgian) quotes Simenon, who was asked why he didn’t change his ...”

“... of the background to the current state of the IRA is knowledgeably sketched by Eamonn Mallie and Patrick Bishop. Anyone looking for startling new disclosures will be disappointed, but theirs is a solid, lucidly written account. Their judgments are shrewd and unsentimental and their analysis of the IRA of the Sixties acute. But their coverage of a number of ...”

“... Duddy was primarily responsible for the message of February 1993, purportedly from Martin McGuinness: ‘The conflict is over but we need your advice on how to bring it to a close.’ This fake message ‘broke the logjam’, not least because it ‘echoed’ a very recent speech made by McGuinness.The back-channel ...”

“... up for direct discussion between the British Government and the Republican leadership. As Martin McGuinness put it in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of ...”

“... secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours later, of 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint – the army’s heaviest single loss in Northern Ireland – Thatcher asked Maurice Oldfield, the recently retired head of MI6, to ...”

“... Adams were to see off his opponents, he would have to produce results. In the early Nineties, Sir Patrick Mayhew was able to taunt Sinn Fein as being ‘a mere ten per cent party’ and not worth talking to; most commentators agreed, and the consensus was that while the Party had a solid core of loyal supporters it was unlikely to expand. Sinn Fein was ...”