Quotes from Fintan O'Toole

He has the vocal modulation of a railway-station announcer, the expressive power of a fence-post and the charisma of a week-old head of lettuce.

This may be the last stage of imperialism–having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.

Her decision to do so – when she had a working majority in Parliament – was not pure vanity. It was the inevitable result of the völkisch rhetoric she had adopted when she told her first Tory Party conference as leader that 'if you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere', openly evoking the far-right (and Stalinist) trope of 'rootless cosmopolitans' who did not deserve citizenship.

An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea' – TURKISH PROVERB

The Irish Times ran an editorial in 1956, full of dark intimations that the Irish would become like other indigenous peoples who had lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival: 'What matters is that we will disappear as a composite race. We will add our name or names to those of the races that assimilate us; but as an entity, we will cease to exist.

For reasons that may puzzle anthropologists long into the future, the prawn cocktail – a few (hopefully unfrozen) crustaceans placed in a glass on a bed of shredded lettuce, smothered in a pink Marie Rose sauce and sprinkled with paprika had become the quintessential English idea of fine dining.

dignified, decent, democratic settlement that allowed the natural warmth of a neighbourly relationship to come fully to the surface.

This mentality is by no means exclusive to the Right. There is a long leftist tradition of seeing continental slavishness as a threat to English liberty, and of imagining England as the only green and pleasant land in which the new Jerusalem could be built.

Yet the idea of American investment was potent. To open the Irish economy up so that British bosses could employ Irish workers was to admit defeat. To have American firms in small Irish towns would be to embrace a thrilling modernity and simultaneously to reconnect with the great Irish-American diaspora in whom so much hope – from tourist dollars to support for the national cause of ending partition – had been invested

There were many factors at work, but the proximate cause was undoubtedly the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In part, the new English nationalism is thus another example of the dominant power mimicking the gestures of small-nation 'liberation' movements – the English were reacting to and mirroring the emergence of a potent and effective Scottish nationalism.

They opened a place in Irishness for the diasporas that were, in many ways, the truest products of its history. It brought home the reality that had been obscured in the idea of emigration as tragedy and shame: we are a hyphenated people.

the uncensorable power of the simplest form of private literature: the letter home.

As always, what mattered was the maintenance of the twin-track Irish mind. Reality could continue on its own sweet way, so long as it was not reflected in what the state said about itself. The façade was much more important than the building.

The new 'Dunkirk spirit' is a kind of hysteria in which the ordinary vicissitudes of life (especially those involving Brits abroad among foreigners) are raised to the level of epic suffering.

Brussels,' as Richard Weight puts it, 'replaced Brixton as the whipping boy of British nationalists.

the far-right is the white man's #MeToo movement. Not only am I not guilty, but I am in fact a victim.

Fifty Shades is, indeed, hilariously bureaucratic. Submission, as it happens, is like EU membership: tediously legalistic. Poor Anastasia finds herself embroiled in complex negotiations before she can get down to business. It is not enough for the Europeans that they get to whip you – they have to torture you with paperwork as well:

The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves when we do not get what we know we deserve.

The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from 'heart of Empire' to 'occupied colony'. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history.

In the hurry through which known and strange things pass, the strange things were sometimes very well known and the known things were often deeply strange.

Europe,' Barnett writes, 'moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn't.' One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.

Militant nationalism needed regular transfusions of young blood to keep it alive, because it led a kind of vampiric half-life, imaginatively and emotionally draining but not visible in any mirror held up to contemporary Irish reality.

The Limerick Leader reported that 'To-day there's many an O'Grady from Clare, who regard Muhammad Ali as one of their own.

Had she been able to see into the future, she might have pointed out that she was previewing her successors' plans for a possible no-deal Brexit.