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“... Sometimes this town remembers its past,’ says Agnes in The Secret Servant, pausing in the gun-play to quote Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’. This thriller is about contemporary nuclear strategies and the elimination of agents and double agents. Agnes is an agent herself (from ‘Box 500’, which seems to mean MI5), and the hero is no sooner posted to 10 Downing Street than a grenade comes through the front door ...”

“... some poets today deny them all. Her Serene Highness is distinctively and successfully present in Sean O’Brien’s poems of workaday life. He envisages, for instance, an ‘hour of general safety’ when you can rest peacefully and Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline. Leave slugs to make free with the pansies in a world where momentarily The ...”

“... Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted. Announcing that ‘Before we start/this evening’s art/we’d like to take you through a bit of theory,’ Foley and McColl went ...”

“... religious or civic leaders. The rows about the past are replicated at local level: Councillor Sean McGlinchey, who served 18 years for his role in a car bombing in Coleraine in 1973 that killed six people, is now the Sinn Fein mayor of Limavady. In Cookstown, my town, a large wooden sign was nailed to a lamppost in Monrush, a Protestant housing ...”

“... quote this anecdote, but he prints as one of his four epigraphs an exchange between Trimble and Sean Farren, a senior Irish Nationalist, at Duisburg in the late 1980s: ‘What do you want for your people?’ Farren asked. ‘To be left alone,’ Trimble replied. This statement, and the meaning of ‘Sinn Fein’, ‘Ourselves Alone’, reverberate in the ...”

“... its wider social and cultural contexts – education acts, decolonisation, immigration – while Sean O’Brien, author of The Deregulated Muse, a fine critical panorama of contemporary poetry, commends ‘the emergence of new poetries from formerly unsuspected sources’. There is also a step towards devolution, with Armitage and Crawford including a more ...”

“... two antitheses which he does not appear to recognise: the contrast between Belfast and what Frank Wright calls the ‘unreformable’ decaying border areas, and between Ulster as the last representative of a British tradition and the rest of Britain which has, in the eyes of very many Protestants, betrayed it. The Ulster state was never a monolithic ...”

“... grifter. Yeats had been present at the play’s notorious premiere in Paris in 1896, but Barbara Wright’s translation for the Themersons was its first appearance in English. From the opening word – Ubu’s exclamation ‘Shittr!’ (‘Merdre!’ in the original) – Wright captures Jarry’s freewheeling slang ...”

“... 1964) – he was the first Unionist prime minister to do so – and for receiving Sean Lemass, the Irish taoiseach, at Stormont. In reality, O’Neill was never much of a cake-sharer. His attitude to Catholics – and to working-class Protestants, for that matter – was patrician. ‘It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants,’ he ...”