"...it feels inescapably weird to reach half-time in a Champions League game and find myself buffered by offers of cheaper car insurance, budget Mediterranean holidays, and jarringly regular injunctions that I join the British Army corps of engineers..."

"Constantly framing austerity decisions as “tough choices” was clearly intended to make Labour seem serious and sober — the sensible adults returning to the room — but its primary effect has been to highlight the choices not made."

This week, A Very Royal Scandal dropped on Amazon Prime, the second big-budget filmic treatment of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview to have been released in just five months

"I, for one, shudder to think how many replacement Macbook chargers they’ll have to sell to recoup that amount of money. Six? Seven, even?"

I asked friends, acquaintances — and finally the entire internet — to furnish me with as many cosmic overspends as they could remember from recent Irish history — welcome to the mouth of madness

"And if I find Oasis’s ‘each-chord-begets-the-next’ melodies somewhat childish, I must concede they’re a good deal less childish than me carrying on a grudge I first founded in primary school, for very little reason, to impress precisely nobody."

"Growing up in the north of Ireland, the jackboot of British imperialism had, in one of its harsher crimes, robbed us of coins featuring fish and cows and kept its altogether inferior currency rigidly in place."

"We were meant to love and hate Paris and Nicole — indeed to love hating them; to find their guileless hauteur sometimes hilarious, sometimes repulsive, but always compelling."

Belfast still has an ethnic minority tally of less than 7% — a significant proportion of whom were either born there, or are overseas students on temporary visas

Some strange sense of living death now reigns in a conglomerate that once felt like an irresistible, unstoppable force