I’m on hand to give you the lowdown on the sparkliest baubles on the cinematic Christmas tree

"“It’s simple”, I say, “it’s like how if you praise an arsonist enough, he’ll eventually become a fireman. It’ll all work out in the end”. If this seems strange, please be assured that it is."

“We flagellate ourselves too much in Ireland” said Donal Ryan at one of the talks, when the subject of the mother and baby homes came up. “But we congratulate ourselves a lot too” replied Caoilinn Hughes, to a consensus of laughter.

"Bluesky, for many new adoptees, is that friend’s house: a space that has all the actual functions Twitter once had but without the nostril-burning excremental odour we’ve all trained ourselves to ignore."

"Mortified that someone would fuss over me, I adopted a breezily upright gait and a neutral expression — this achieved the desired effect but led, almost immediately, to the opposite emotional response within me: I found myself distantly offended that no one seemed to care.

"I am not in the business of rehabilitating the image of Trump voters — the combined ranks of the American media have spent nearly 10 years doing enough of that already — but this is too simple an explanation for what appears to have happened."

"I may have thought I was unfit and out-of-shape in 2019 but I now realise this is relative. At that time, I was undoubtedly pudgier than I’d ever been, but I was also clearly willing to have a topless photo of myself published in a national newspaper."

If you’re reading this on Saturday, we’re right on its cusp. With a pleasing asymmetry, this time tomorrow won’t even be 'this time' tomorrow. It’ll be an hour earlier. I think...

"When comfortably middle-class people die of drug overdoses, it is described as ‘tragic’, they are ‘troubled’ and we are ‘devastated’. Less well-heeled addicts are ‘users’ and, well, we tend not to speak about their deaths quite as much at all."

"Ireland has, in fact, been in Lebanon long enough that some of the local staff who’ve worked closely with them have developed strongly-accented English, as displayed in an old RTÉ news segment that went viral this week"