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“... restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978). The records of suicide caught Peuchet’s eye, and he had a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that ...”

“... where Stephen says: ‘Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.’ Richard Ellmann virtually solved it in Ulysses on the Liffey (1972) with his chapter called ‘The Riddle of Scylla and Charybdis’, which argues that ‘the answer to the sphinx’s riddle was man, the answer to Scylla-Charybdis’s is the act of love.’ But ...”

“... next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most important, perceived Soviet expansionism in more than twenty countries, including ...”

“... of a mid-Victorian Ian Paisley, an Irishman bearing the exquisitely un-Protestant name of Murphy, which enliven the pages of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: but both belong to the same record of continual religious controversy in 19th-century England. (It was intramural contention, however, not the larger one between Protestant and ...”

“... fell neatly end to end. It was balletic; it was a card trick; it was industrial. It was totally Richard Serra. The artist wouldn’t thank me for the analogy. Analogy isn’t Serra’s thing. But as a foreigner, you can’t visit America and not see the forms and the textures and the dynamics of the Serraverse everywhere you look: in the serial squares of ...”

“... topographical scholarship. In this context the names of two retired soldiers, Colonel Norman Murphy in Cumbria and Colonel Michael Cobb in Devon, spring to the lips. Marlborough is now on the metaphysical overlay map of Wodehouse’s Merry England. Back to your ...”

“... of formal policy-maker have come to the fore. There are the passive functionaries – men like Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East; he travels here and there but because he is a career Arabist his influence is nil. More ominous are the ideological over-achievers, typified by ...”

“... any. The recondite wheezes, dystopian prophecies, soft-brained schemes and social essays Douglas Murphy scrutinises in Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture (Verso, £20) mostly led nowhere and spawned no progeny. Perhaps one should write ‘have’ mostly led nowhere, because there is still time, an infinity, for them to be exhumed in ...”

“... by loyalist terrorists, one of the workers, Walter Chapman, whispered to the sole Catholic, Richard Hughes, that he should stay silent. But one of the gunmen recognised Hughes and ordered him to ‘clear off down the road’. He did so and the gunmen opened fire, with armalites, SLRs, a 9mm pistol and an M1 carbine, on the remaining men. In less than a ...”

“... tech companies, management consultancies – to send more staff to help with policy work. Jim Murphy, the former Scottish Labour leader turned lobbyist, has praised Starmer’s ‘openness with the private sector’, predicting that this will be ‘the first private-sector government in Labour’s history’. A left-wing Labour MP complained to me that ...”

“... world and back again. Here, at the end, Mount is on the trail of one of the book’s heroes, Richard Jefferies, Victorian polymath, nature writer, campaigner against the exploitation of agricultural labourers, fantasist and (in Mount’s semi-serious conceit) a 19th-century avatar of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. One of Jefferies’s favourite ...”

“... of bourgeois morality, but The Accidental Woman is clearly the work of a young man who’s read Murphy, Watt and First Love. The allegiance to Beckett is chiefly signalled by a studied disdain for the conventions of realism (‘Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I’m buggered if I can describe one’), along with some suitably ...”

“... ends. Four years of rage and lies; four years of racism and xenophobia so coarse and inflammatory Richard Nixon might have blushed; four years of dismantling economic and environmental regulation, packaged as a populist revolution on behalf of the forgotten (white) American; four years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of overlapping agencies, each competing for Presidential attention, and believing, in the words of Richard Helms (DCI 1966-73), that it had ‘to have a publication that arrives in the White House every morning’. Because of presidents’ short attention spans and crowded time-tables, the ‘publications’ have increasingly resembled tabloid newspapers ...”