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“... Tom Murphy’s play Too Late for Logic centres on the response of a psychically disintegrated family to the death of one of its members. An oracular, disembodied voice-over gives the summation: ‘A group of porcupines on a cold winter’s day crowded close together to save themselves from freezing by their mutual warmth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in its tight mesh of unpaved, filthy streets, courts, lanes and rows. I don’t know how William Murphy, a shoemaker born in the 1820s, and his wife, Lydia, survived the cholera epidemic of 1849, but they turn up thereafter in different lodgings, mostly on Albion Street, notorious for its beer-shops and brothels (one of their seven children was Flora, my ...”

“... its past or to England, thus it is difficult for Kiberd to have much to say about John Banville or Tom Murphy or Derek Mahon. And there are other writers, such as John McGahern, to whom these old dreams and inventions mean nothing at all, or those who found or find them worthy merely of jokes and asides, such as Flann O’Brien or Paul Muldoon. Inventing ...”

“... trade, was that of a professional author any purer? Although Fielding’s most enduring work, and Tom Jones (1749) especially, were the result of a painstaking commitment to the craft of writing, he always wanted to disguise the vulgarities of effort, and nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas ...”

“... wasn’t happy about being the nation’s best-known cuckold; her children were teased. Her son, Tom, the Prince’s godson, ‘was forced to listen to other boys at school reading the creepiest sections of the transcript out loud’. Camilla herself received hate-mail and crank calls. According to a friend, ‘for a time she thought she was the most hated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and utility I could try to tell you that Babylon Berlin is a television mini-series created by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten. I looked up this information, and in theory it is possible that I could have extracted it from the show’s credit sequence – except that you can never quite read the credits: the lettering is small, and it ...”

“... treated in Irish writing. In the 1960s, playwrights such as Eugene McCabe in King of the Castle, Tom Murphy in A Whistle in the Dark and John B. Keane in The Field began to work on the mixture of violence and impotence in the Irish male psyche. And in the 1970s John McGahern published two novels, The Leavetaking and The Pornographer, which opened new ...”

“... sea. The impression is enhanced by the fact that the heroic pilot’s role is handsomely filled by Tom Hardy, while the navy gets Kenneth Branagh, his eyes moist as he thinks of ‘home’, and ready to stay on after the evacuation to do what he can ‘for the French’. I imagine this line is meant to sound decent, even noble, but it comes across as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse walking behind in black L Boom and Tom Kernan that drunken little barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C ... But the point is lost on 694/773, where ‘Boom’ is printed as ‘Bloom’. In the Nausicaa chapter, 368/370, Bloom is watching Gerty McDowell on Sandymount ...”

“... the Omagh bombing in 1998. Any reader with an internet connection can identify Suspect A as Colm Murphy, who was found liable for the Omagh bombing and was convicted in the US for trying to buy a consignment of M60 machine guns for the INLA. A half-way house between truth and allegation, the report also describes nine other suspects and assigns them code ...”

“... Joyce and Beckett, a position acknowledged by Joyce in his collocation of At Swim Two Birds with Murphy as Jean quirit and Jean qui pleure. But the aesthetic is also a fence around O’Nolan’s reservation. In 1973, in the only thorough essay we have on O’Nolan’s art, published in Miles: Portraits of Brian O’Nolan, J.C.C. Mays delineated the complex ...”

“... to find a house where she could spend the winter (their difficult stay is recounted by Richard Murphy in his autobiography The Kick). Hughes’s letters appear cheerful and engaged and free of guilt. At this time, curiously, he concocts a plan to send poems out under one or two pseudonyms. He wants to invent a rival poet, ‘or perhaps two’, who will ...”