"The celebration we’re enjoying this weekend has only really existed in the UK and Ireland since 1972, when my dad was already an adult and — quite conveniently for him — about to become a father himself."

"Part of the show’s genius is in creating such compelling drama from protagonists who could read as stock in less nimble hands."

"...there have been enough distinct massacres that they now bear shorthand names to be more easily distinguished from each other; the flour massacre, the Jabalia massacre, the Al-Shifa massacre, to name but three..."

"I pay for my daughter’s childcare via a website that requires five-factor verification. Five. First, I input my username and password, then I get a text which gives me a code to enter so I can reach a set of three mystery questions which, once answered, will finally allow the payment to be made."

"It’s a coward’s bluff to say I shouldn’t care about recycling just because Taylor Swift takes a private plane from her bedroom to her kitchen if she wants a glass of water every night"

'Getting nostalgic for the Troubles is merely an absurdist stretching of that point, and a salutary lesson in the complacency of rose-tinted history'

I’m happy that Alex Jones doesn’t know enough about Ireland to get my hometown’s name right. We will not sleepwalk into making it a place he’d feel right at home.

"For the past decade, a surge in patriotic populism has seized the UK’s government and popular press, weaponising itself against every grievance; Europe, immigrants, the environmental protesters, the environment, unions, LGBT people, and human rights."

"...arguably the best compliment I can pay this adaptation is that it’s managed the same tightrope walk of tone and detail [as its inspiration] with aplomb..."

"Ensh*ttification is everywhere. It’s in the degradation of social media platforms and the ubiquity of crap customer service bots, it’s in the robotic voices incapable of answering your queries on the phone to your own bank."