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

"...maybe Trump, a historically unpopular candidate who just happens to have the good luck to be running against a man currently incapable of sentience, has simply acquired every single vote he can possibly get from the American electorate..."

"There are several entirely useful applications for IQ tests... but fetishising their results only really provides comfort to the type of person who wishes to make themselves feel superior by genetic fiat."

The appeal of Swift’s music seems much less puzzling to me than that of many others

"It seems clear to me that these authors each made a small stand at their own cost in the face of financial conglomerates seeking to wreath immoral wealth with the fig leaf of cultural philanthropy."