It being January and a new year and all that, perhaps there are some locutions that we should think of putting on the back burner going forward.

John Henry Patterson, born in Ballymahon, Co Longford, was a soldier, then a big-cat hunter in Africa and eventually a sponsor of Zionism and the creation of an Israeli fighting force. He died in California in 1947 and was reinterred in Israel last month.

John Carey thought that Oxford academics were a privileged bunch who had a nerve telling other people what to think. Irish professors are not so rarefied a breed. Perhaps more of them should occasionally peek out and contribute to public debate.

The names of the metro stops in Paris have a certain poetry, Richard Cobb thought, while its reassuring efficiency conveys a sense of security, a sense that one will certainly, at the end of the night, get home to bed.

A tribute to the life and work of Bob Purdie, left-wing writer, activist and analyst, a Scottish trade unionist who identified with militant Irish republicanism, then changed his mind, and ended up campaigning for Scottish independence.

Made a mistake? A really bad one? The best thing to do is to own up. In full..

It has been suggested that many participants in the First World War sleepwalked into a conflict whose future dimensions they could not at the time imagine. But Italy walked into it wide awake … having first devoted some thought to who was likely to win.