Kierkegaard is rather heady reading for a high school student.

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

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.

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.