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“... There’s​ a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an organism able to survive both on land and in water, and that it comes from the Greek for ‘double life’. Though you would be hard-pressed to draw a clean analogy, Murray surely qualifies as an amphibious writer: funny and cerebral, brilliant at an improbable range of things and driven by a desire to upset perceived dichotomies ...”

“... are. Realism can refer to the representational mode of an art form, or to its cognitive effect. Paul Murray quotes me in this book as claiming that the Irish literary tradition is one of ‘largely non-realistic works’, whereas what I actually wrote was ‘non-realist’. ‘Realistic’ is a value term, whereas ‘realist’ is not, or not ...”

“... were no leaders, but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma who looked Chinese, and Hans who knew his world as a fox knows a field. Hunted with needles, exposed, unfed, this time in their thousands they bore sad cuts for having gazed, and shuffled, and failed to field the lore ...”

“... alone in the Berkshire woods, where he enjoys a visit from his old high-school English teacher, Murray Ringold. As the 90-year-old Murray passes several martini-flavoured nights on Nathan’s porch, their conversation returns again and again to Murray’s long dead brother Ira, who was ...”

“... family, after the takeover of the firm by Smith, Elder & Co (itself soon to be taken over by John Murray). A descendant – loyally named Richard Bentley – had lovingly conserved and catalogued them for posterity. In 1967, the BL acquired a tranche of early Macmillan papers: Harold Macmillan, it seems, was keen that the family firm’s archive should remain ...”

“... very soon started to show signs of the malaise it was set up to cure. One man, Charles Knight Murray, assumed great power over the Church estates, but forgot to tell the Commissioners that he was a director of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway and an eager speculator in railway shares. To pay for his prodigious share purchases, he intercepted and ...”

“... decision, but other alterations were advised by his informal editorial panel, his publisher John Murray and the odd couple of John Sparrow and Tom Driberg. Sparrow was a grammarian pedant, ‘a great which-hunter’, as Murray put it, while Driberg watched the tenses and any surfeit of sentiment like a hawk. ‘If that’s ...”

“... Prodigious and frustrating, welcoming and cantankerous, Les Murray’s body of work has made him both Australia’s best-known poet and its most powerful. Full of Australian history, places and things, his poetry also displays the more abstract qualities Murray likes to think of as Australian ...”

“... made things worse. This thesis was popularised in the influential book Losing ground, by Charles Murray, published in 1984. Murray noted the inconclusive findings of social research. He pointed out that since 1965 generous rates of social security benefit had been available to workers and non-workers alike. He claimed that ...”

“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... Tomlinson’s death encouraged Peach’s family to ask again for the Cass Report to be released. Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, agreed to do so. The inquest into Tomlinson’s death resulted in a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The ...”

“... always carefully selected. Classic examples of the 19th-century attitude towards lexicography were Murray in England and Emile Littré in France. Neither man was lacking either on the authoritarian or on the imaginative side: but both chose to present themselves, in accordance with the spirit of the age, as mere collectors and arrangers of lexical ...”

“... Abuse by Jonathan Self. Whether or not he may have any famous relatives is hinted at in the John Murray catalogue, which tells us that Self’s father, ‘Professor Self’, from whose lips ‘the word love never escaped,’ was ‘“fond” of his wife, “fond” of his boys, Jonathan and Will, “very fond” of Brownie, the dog’. Having a famous ...”

“... Philological Society, based at the University of London, the amazing sticktoitiveness of James Murray, editor and mastermind of the project from 1879 to his death in 1915, and the (initially) nervous patron, OUP, who inherited the project 22 year after its launch. Willinsky tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth ...”

“... Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, sent a letter to Murray Bookchin, an 83-year-old, wheelchair-bound, arthritic eco-anarchist in Burlington, Vermont. Öcalan was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement on an island off the Turkish coast. In prison he’d abandoned Marxism-Leninism and was in search of a ...”