Having succeeded in escaping from Ireland, after the assassination, McDara is haunted, in a Dostoevskean mode, by his own conscience. He is tortured while awake and asleep by a vision of the scene of assassination.

Kierkegaard is rather heady reading for a high school student.

All that image-building and reputation-slaying in the name of democracy, and at the end of it another four years in opposition to the Tory Tyrannosaurus Regina.

Experienced mechanics can diagnosis the condition of machinery just by listening.