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“... Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’ That’s known as Murphy’s Law. It’s invoked in all sorts of settings, but its natural modern home is in engineering, where it is generally attributed to a remark made around 1950 by an aeronautical engineer called Ed Murphy, who was working on the design of rocket sleds at Edwards Air Force Base in California ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... cameras. When we reached Trafalgar Square I noticed an EU flag tied to the equestrian statue of Charles I. Passing down Whitehall, just after Banqueting House, where Charles had his head cut off, removal vans could be seen parked outside 10 Downing Street. In Parliament Square, the Hare Krishnas were dishing out free ...”

“... Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, ...”

“... Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William ...”

“... Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it,’ Ralph Nader said. As Tim Murphy wrote last year in Mother Jones, ‘the state’s centre of gravity began to shift from the world of chemicals to the big business of other people’s business – banking, accounting, law and telemarketing.’ Delaware is suited for this: a chancery court ...”

“... by people who know that the spokesman for the original America First movement, 77 years ago, was Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to ...”

“... of ‘historical London figures’ and ‘modern day heroes’. Ada (Lovelace), who worked with Charles Babbage on his ‘analytical engine’, is paired with Phyllis (Pearsall), the artist who claimed to have tramped three thousand miles in mapping streets for the A-Z. The most recent partnership, Jessica (Ennis) and Ellie (Simmonds), were christened, as ...”

“... know our correct birthdays even. One of his ancestors suppressed a riot by laying low a man called Murphy, a thug at the head of a mob who was wielding a wire whip. For this feat, his ancestor was rewarded with the post of sanitary inspector.From Liverpool he brings jelly animals and a strange kind of balloon with faces and ears, and cardboard feet you can tie ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”

“... 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 ...”