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“... One of this book’s chief virtues is candour. If John Cummins first saw Drake as the knightly figure sans peur et sans reproche who had been held up for admiration to so many generations, it must have grieved him to find how far upwards the feet of clay could reach. But he states the facts with a fine impartiality ...”

“... were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... J​eanine Cummins’s​  American Dirt (Tinder, £14.99) begins with a massacre. Fourteen people are killed at a birthday barbecue: the family – husband, mother, cousins etc – of Lydia Pérez and her eight-year-old son, Luca, who are hiding in the bathroom. One of the three assailants uses the toilet, unaware that mother and son, the actual targets of the raid, are cowering in the shower: ‘Their eyes are closed, their bodies motionless, even their adrenaline is suspended within the calcified will of their stillness ...”

“... of the failed landscape around them was seeping into their music. A local photographer, Kevin Cummins, was commissioned by the NME in January 1979 to take a series of portraits of Joy Division inside the grotty warehouse where the band rehearsed; most striking are those showing the band’s singer, Ian Curtis, pale and brooding, lit by dusty light. ...”

“... Man consisted of Jimmy O’Dea and David Kelly, or that Th’Oul Lad of Kilsalaher featured Danny Cummins and Máire Hastings. All a bit half-hearted. I can find only one video clip online of Flann O’Brien being interviewed, from 1964. It’s astonishingly depressing – the man is so alcohol-raddled that he can hardly get a sentence out – so the ...”