NORMALLY, when biographies cause problems for the subject, it’s because of something included in the book.

To find Marian Keyes eating the face off Marian Finucane on Twitter is like finding your budgie savaging your alsatian.

Natalie Facetimed me the other day. No warning. Out of the blue.

You could tell from early on that he was never going to make it, this child. Not saying he didn’t come from a good family. He did. His grandfather and then his father were our GPs.

SET to one side the morality of the quasi-judicial approach and let us deal instead with the craziness of it. The sheer, straight-up, no-messing craziness. The braindead loopiness that characterised this kind of procedure at the time and runs through any contemporary justification of it.

THE song should never have been a hit anywhere because its title was weird: ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah’. (Translation: ‘Hello Mother, Hello Father’.) It should certainly never have been a hit in Ireland because the entire song was about something we didn’t have back in the 1960s: Summer camps.

Where there’s a will, there’s a shedload of trouble, which is why I love the cable channel devoted to telling the story of wills and the murder and mayhem they generate.

IT WAS an impulse purchase, let’s be honest. The man in my life became briefly insufferable about all the diseases he could not get because of all the vaccinations he’d had, so I decided to take a prescription out of his book, so to speak, and get the flu jab.

WHETHER it’s a brilliant idea that morphs into a failed stroke, or a cock-up that started with the best of intentions, there’s a time to raise the hands and say you got it wrong.

TIM ‘Boomer’ Carroll is a friend of mine. A Boston-Irish firefighter, he is. Don’t ask me what the ‘Boomer’ stands for. Something sporting, probably. Boomer loves Ireland. Starting with its literature.