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“... been to remove him and see if the economy kept growing. Sacking Brown or moving him to the Foreign Office (with the strong possibility that Brown would resign in protest) would have been messy, unpleasant and unpredictable. It might have led to open warfare. But Blair does not explain to us why he believed it was a war he ...”

“... In the autumn of 1982 three policemen in Northern Ireland were killed by a landmine planted by the IRA. At once, the Royal Ulster Constabulary plotted their revenge. Acting on information provided by one of their informers in the IRA – who has been paid many, many thousands of pounds – they identified five Republicans who were said to have been responsible for the landmine, and a hay shed which was, according to the informer, used by the IRA to hoard weapons ...”

“... them, one begins to wonder, glumly, how far one can trust anything the British press writes about Ireland. In 1972 Harold Wilson met with IRA leaders in Dublin, and the next year the Northern Ireland Minister, Willie Whitelaw, made similar contacts. This utterly shocked opinion in every officers’ mess in Ulster ...”

“... who successfully spied on this expeditionary force for the English, would have been quite at home in either setting. The phenomenon of the Irish in America, which forms the backdrop to much of J.A. Cole’s fascinating book, is still an important political reality, though it has changed dramatically from the days when those ragged armies charged across ...”

“... of the island. The original problems remain, with a malignancy enhanced by the passage of time, in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland remains a mirror image of the original ‘Irish problem’, but with the very considerable complication that the political balance militates against the application of a similar ...”

“... 1969) is unequalled,’ Roy Foster wrote in his bibliographical essay at the back of his Modern Ireland 1600-1972. But sometimes, despite the fact that I am not an Irish nationalist (or at least I hope I am not), when I read Pakenham’s book about the central event in the history of the place where I was brought up, I find the tone and the use of language ...”

“... The debate over Ireland’s decision to maintain neutrality during the Second World War periodically resurfaces in the letters page of the Irish Times, exposing the cracks in established political pieties. The challenge tends to come from those resistant to the idea that the political circumstances of the time made neutrality the most rational policy ...”

“... There’s​ a Northern Irish joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth ...”

“... also appear to have become over-confident. The killing of Lord Justice Gibson, number two in the Northern Ireland judiciary, and his wife, and the almost daily grenade, mortar and rifle attacks on RUC/British Army bases, had given the IRA their most successful four months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers on one ...”

“... who was the Deputy-Prime Minister of the Kirghizi Republic. After we had discussed her goats at home, the excellence of her walnuts, and the fact that her district grew the most tasty apricots in the world, she came to the point. Fourteen times, she told me, her fellow tribespeople on the other side of the Afghan border had asked for military help to ...”

“... of the imagination be held responsible for or even sympathetic to British government policy in Northern Ireland. The universal horror at this, the biggest killing of civilians in British post-war history, was to some extent assuaged when the Police announced on 24 November, three days after the bombing, that they were satisfied they had caught the ...”

“... doing, to other people, to people we knew. Then, in the 1997 general election, after I had left home and gone to university in England, Martin McGuinness became our MP. He never could have been my father, of course. Even the words I use betray my upbringing: Derry or Londonderry? Full disclosure might be proper, though it is unusual in writing about ...”

“... of Easter 1916 was the most important event in 20th-century Irish history, marking the moment when Ireland emerged symbolically from English domination. Sinn Fein’s extraordinary tally of seats at the 1918 general election, the guerrilla war against the British forces that followed, the establishment of the Free State in 1921, and de Valera’s unilateral ...”

“... soldier. Speech bubbles had been added to it, so that the boy was saying: ‘Why are you going home, Daddy?’ ‘Because the Provies have surrendered,’ the squaddy replies. A few of the Unionists I spoke to sounded this note of triumph at the IRA ceasefire but not many. Most were either sniffing secret deals or talking about waiting and seeing. ‘Peace ...”

“... built on speculation: Truss enters Number 10 as the least known prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home. It is hard to disentangle campaign sops to the base from serious plans for government, but other sources are also mute. There is little reason to suppose Truss holds much affection for Johnson’s 2019 manifesto: ‘levelling up’ persists for now as a ...”