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“... How many books have I read? Two hundred, three hundred, five hundred …? I could compile a list. But what would it tell me? What I know? What I have forgotten? What I was? What I wanted to be? What my mother and father wanted and expected and expect me to be? Millions of Cats, Goodnight Moon, Caps for Sale, Where the wild things are, The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Stuart Little, The Secret Garden, The Borrowers, The Little Prince, Member of the Wedding, Gigi, Lord of the Flies, Return of the Native … This is Willa, the 15-year-old narrator of Early Disorder, looking at her bookshelf and wondering if you are what you read ...”

“... At the outbreak of World War One, the British Government decided to postpone Home Rule for Ireland, which had just been enacted. Despite this, many Nationalists as well as Unionists enlisted in the British Army. Some radical Nationalists came to believe that action was needed to revive national sentiment. The Easter Rising of 1916 failed, but the execution of most of its leaders, followed two years later by an attempt to impose conscription on Ireland, led to a radicalisation of Nationalist opinion ...”

“... to know how to drive safely. There is a detailed account in the monthly reports he sent to Timothy O’Keeffe, his publisher at MacGibbon and Kee, of the writing and revising of his last novel, The Dalkey Archive, which focuses obsessively on the question of whether Saint Augustine was black. The longest and most revealing correspondence is with Niall ...”

“... As a result, a minority Tory administration is propped up by the hardline evangelicals of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). And yet, the most bizarre feature of May’s unsuccessful dash to the polls remains the extraordinary Tory manifesto. Most commentators have focused on its controversial and quickly overturned provisions on social ...”

“... little less than there was thirty years ago. The essays on the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy and West Germany permit the conclusion that in all these countries the top 10 per cent earn about 30 per cent of all income earned, whereas the bottom 30 per cent earn a mere 10 per cent. What changes there have been have affected, above all, the ...”

“... shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of the hostelry that Henderson had long since helped to establish as ‘the hub of the Scottish Folk Revival’. Instead, he seeks to establish him as a ...”

“... to pass on a collection of their work to her. One picture had been painted by a boy called Timothy, who was born on the day that McCarthy was seized. When McCarthy was held hostage in Beirut, journalists found themselves asking what his relationship was with Morrell. The shade of Pooter stalks the journalist who reads too much into his own ...”

“... in English, who made a comparable contribution to a son’s achievement. Many fathers, like Sir Timothy Shelley Bt, inspired their sons by disliking them, and having that dislike returned in full force as a lofty hatred. John Shakespeare – what about him? All we know is that his eldest seems to have treated him with a proper filial respect and managed to ...”

“... development. The dominant popular image of Edward VII – unduly influenced, even created, by Timothy West’s portrayal in the 1970s television drama – is of a jolly, ageing playboy with no interests beyond the runners at Newmarket, his next lavish meal and the charms of his latest mistress. Heffer’s Edward is rather different, a politician manqué ...”

“... problems, seeing them as things that happen to someone else. But then you have Brexit and Northern Ireland, and it suddenly becomes clear that no one is safe. Russia is fighting Ukraine about borders. This means that, as well as dodging bombs and getting used to living in the dark, residents of the border zone have to decide if they are ‘really’ Russian or ...”

“... haunted by the Great Famine, which began with the failure of the potato crop in certain parts of Ireland in 1845. It is recorded, for example, that on 5 April 1847 four thousand destitute labourers gathered at Gort, the nearest town to Coole Park, looking for work. In 1848 a Poor Law inspector visiting the workhouse in Gort wrote that he could scarcely ...”

“... casts light on the contributions made by the gifted linguist Thomas Phelippes and the physician Timothy Bright to theoretical and practical advances in the science of cryptanalysis. It is also illuminating about the underworld of turncoats and opportunists in which Walsingham immersed himself and whom he suborned and corrupted with promises of ...”

“... doctrine of metempsychosis, of the fusion of identities across history, is the abiding spirit of Timothy O’Grady’s extraordinary first novel, Motherland. It may suggest the scope and texture of this risky, ambitious, consciously Irish work, which broadens and concentrates its protagonist’s mind by having him travel about in ...”

“... the province. Now, Westminster politics looks more like an extension of what happens in Northern Ireland. If a return to the early 1970s means British politics being overshadowed by entrenched divisions in Northern Ireland, then here we go again. But that isn’t what Brexit was designed to achieve. Liberating the British ...”

“... breached, which forbade discussion of withdrawal in party debate on the future of Northern Ireland. The most curious feature of the discourse on riot, both inside and outside the Commons, has been how people of opposite political persuasions have been able to find common ground in nostalgia for the solidarities of the old inner-city working-class ...”