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“... an immense force, doubling every few years, was working irresistibly to overcome it.’ Was Henry Adams right that the race would be snuffed out not by nuclear Armageddon, ecological disaster, plague, comet, sun-storm etc, but – don’t laugh – the Women’s Movement? What though it’s not among the signs listed in the Bible or Koran like – to stretch ...”

“... of his vision was lost in the larger themes and grander schemes of his European phase. Brian Adams’s biography is clumsily written. He trips over himself grievously when he tries to explain things frankly as well as painlessly. He sums up the relationship with the Reeds, which emerges in the book as the most important formative influence on ...”

“... interest. Martin? Does this signify something? Meanwhile, in Belfast, reporters were pressing Adams on the ‘permanent’ issue. Adams observed that ‘complete’ was enough for Albert Reynolds, Dick Spring and President Clinton. A Sunday Tribune journalist at the scene described a British reporter badgering away on ...”

“... constitutional party 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 ...”

“... wing of the Continuity IRA, a splinter group formed in the 1980s by those who worried that Gerry Adams was about to betray the movement. People who get their disillusionment in early can often reap the benefits later, but the CIRA has never managed to capitalise on whatever disillusionment there was at the path taken by ...”

“... Brian Aldiss gives his definition of Science Fiction on page one of Chapter One of a five-hundred-page volume. This is admirably bold of him – more timorous scholars tuck their definitions away inconspicuously, or else develop complex excuses for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial. After all, says Aldiss, the definition may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter: ‘we can modify it as we go along ...”

“... credit as pioneers, although the compliment is usually offered in the hope of embarrassing Gerry Adams and his comrades. It was the Official IRA that argued, when the IRA split, for an end to armed struggle and in favour of an internal settlement. The Provos finally accepted the idea two decades later, having in the meantime denounced the Officials as ...”

“... of the DUP and VUPP, formed in 1974, to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement according to which Brian Faulkner, the then-UUP leader, agreed to share power with moderate Nationalists. Faulkner’s compromise was too much for the UUC – the governing body of the UUP. When Faulkner was ditched by the UUC, he took his followers in the UUP and went off to found ...”

“... electoral pundits could barely find enough superlatives for the role played by Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen in the party’s triumph. Ahern, they said, was a ‘political tsunami’, and Cowen, if anything, even more formidable. This time around, neither Ahern nor Cowen was standing, rightly fearing the vengeance of the electorate. Cowen’s awe-inspiring ...”

“... where the bus would be stopped the next day) and shot the three brothers who lived there: John, Brian and Anthony Reavey. (John and Brian died immediately; Anthony died a month later.) Twenty minutes later gunmen entered a house in Ballydougan and shot and killed Joseph O’Dowd and his nephews Barry and Declan, all of ...”

“... America is not usually sympathetic, as one recent comment, prompted by the success of the latest Adams visit, illustrates: ‘the East Coast Irish political circus ... is posturing, tribal, self-indulgent and unhelpful. It’s old-fashioned and it’s lazy’ (the Guardian). A horrible hybrid, particularly offensive to British tastes, has been ...”

“... text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a haunted ...”

“... of the analyst. It was the small discrepancies between prediction and observation that led Adams and Le Verrier to infer the existence of the so far unobserved Neptune, and to calculate with adequate precision where to point the telescope to find it. In this century Pluto was similarly predicted and discovered, and the methods of the French analysts ...”

“... the country. The danger is that they will interpret – indeed are interpreting – the Hume-Adams initiative and the various contacts between the Republican movement and the British and Irish Governments as the writing on the wall. They give every sign of preparing for war. The cargo of arms from Poland, destined for Loyalist ...”

“... This isn’t the Thames Estuary. Tight tight tight. The perfect fit. Like sex? ventures a voice. Brian has a fuzz of red hair, a small snubbed nose, droll expression. Actually no, not like sex at all, says Clive patiently. He is wearing a khaki cap. The girls are giggling. As somebody might know, if he had a minimum of experience. Cru-el! With ...”