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“... of the Ferns Report, written by a tribunal chaired by the former Irish Supreme Court judge Francis Murphy. Ferns is a diocese made up of County Wexford in the south-east of Ireland and parts of some of the bordering counties. The tribunal was set up by the Irish government because there seemed to be more clerical offenders in this diocese than in ...”

“... and an obscurely naughty joke he is said to have passed on about the female pudenda. At heart, Mr Murphy seems to be a serious-minded man and he concentrates on the writings of the great and not-so-great philosophers. Like Roget, he is too keen on grouping his material under abstract headings: the section on Self is followed by ...”

“... you could say, turns on the implicit difference between Sod’s Law (everything goes wrong) and Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong, it will). While the first is vacuous – or a matter of the psychology which ensures we remember the times things go wrong and forget the times they don’t – the second is an engineer’s motto about the scope we ...”

“... to reinforce the reputation of ‘the Palladium of public credit’. It is at this point that Anne Murphy takes her bird’s eye view of a day in the life of the bank. In her acknowledgments she expresses some apprehension about having plumped for this approach, but she need not have worried. This is a model of economic history, acute, profound and ...”

“... of three now almost forgotten lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (1897-1962); Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968), the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and ...”

“... there had been enough money to realise the sculptures of Palladio, Cellini and (surprisingly) St Francis of Assisi which were planned for the west façade, the effect would have been ‘less “modernist masterpiece” than “Gothic cathedral”’. It takes nothing from Mackintosh’s brilliance to note as Calvert does the influence of the Glasgow ...”

“... St Paul as the humiliated son of a failed businessman (and as the inordinately proud descendant of Francis Scott Key, author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’); the glorious salad days at Princeton University, which he left without a degree; the wartime courtship of Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama; the sudden fame – and the marriage to Zelda ...”

“... Lisa Hodgson, talking about a pitch-side encounter she had with the renowned player and coach Alex Murphy: ‘“You don’t bring that player off,” and then he looked me straight in the eyes and said, “unless he’s ——ing dead.”’ And then he pushed me onto the field.’ In 2009, it was discovered that at a game between Harlequins and Leinster, the ...”

“... enrich another. ‘Rapparees, white-boys, volunteers, ribbonmen ...’: so runs a line in Richard Murphy’s poem ‘Green Martyrs’, one of Kinsella’s choices, naming bands of disaffected countrymen from the 17th century to the 19th, and getting the fullest flavour from these allusions; in a similar way, the phrase ‘hedge school’, with its ...”

“... Between 1947 and 1950 Samuel Beckett and Francis Stuart produced a clutch of novels which extend Irish fiction into the world of Europe. Beckett’s life in wartime Paris is not irrelevant to Molloy, Malone dies and The Unnamable, nor is Stuart’s in wartime Berlin to The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross ...”

“... intellectual heroes were English and Continental humanists of the Renaissance – Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Erasmus – questing, chivalric figures who pursued their arduous scholarly experiments in a landscape fraught with dangers and temptations (Smallwood also discerns a ‘tantalising’ series of parallels with Montaigne). Those antecedents went on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than one generation of British film-makers, and what he did for the stage – Beckett, Pinter, Tom Murphy, Terence Rattigan – has changed the game for several more to come. You might say the drama in Karel Reisz’s life existed at quite a deep level, but it also existed in his conversation. At tables, in cars, in foyers, on the phone, Karel Reisz and his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dominated by issues of national government and sectarian difference. With the exception of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’s essay ‘War and Feminism’ there is no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole ...”