"Is that an impossibly young Jude Law in an old Sherlock serial? Is that Tamzin Outhwaite off Eastenders in a cop show that involves time travel for some reason? And for the love of God, which one is Dalziel and which one’s Pascoe?"

"My mother died when I was five, so the grief of it is not something I process every day, at least not consciously."

'Watching rugby, I experience what Alexander Pope called “the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”, and only occasionally find myself bothered by not knowing what’s going on'

"...it was recorded during the 2021 Quiet Lights festival in Cork, in a host of locations around the city - all filmed with unfussy elan."

There’s a common pathology in making the left and right natural opposites, the horseshoe theory

The show aired its final episode a few weeks ago, and it is one of the finest units of television I’ve watched in some time.

"Conspiracies, however disparate, share a common goal; providing false explanations for complex phenomena and, more often than not, ascribing blame to a convenient outgroup rather than to their actual causes."

The Cork hurling championship has moved on to the knockout phase. The format’s cutthroat nature and the competitiveness of the different grades means we are moving on without a host of teams considered title contenders only a few short weeks ago.

"The ‘Up The RA’ bit makes me cringe, mainly because it’s a tuneless football chant stuck in the middle of a song — a big shout, in every sense — which, to my ears, sounds awful."

"With the news that Australia’s ruling Labour party passed a motion supporting a United Ireland, it strikes me that their government is being more direct than our own, which is odd since the prospect of reunification has never seemed more likely..."