Barry Egan

In 2010, when Barack Obama was US president, he invited Corinne Bailey Rae to perform at the White House. At the concert, Michelle Obama told the singer that she was on her iPod; and that herself and her husband often listened to her music. The former first lady wasn’t just paying lip service. In the summer of 2016, Barack Obama told the world that the song Green Aphrodisiac — from Bailey Rae’s album The Heart Speaks In Whispers — was on his official playlist.

It’s been been described as one of the most powerful and significant musical compositions of the 20th century, and Different Trains – the three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich – won a Grammy in 1990 for Best Contemporary ­Composition.

A bustling Friday evening in New York. The manager at the packed Casa Mono in Irving Plaza knows Samantha Barry instantly when we arrive. She is a regular, living just a short walk from the restaurant. There is a table held by the window; she asks if we can sit at the bar. Nothing is a problem for the disarming editor-in-chief of Glamour magazine. Ensconced by the bar — from where we can watch the chefs cook our dinner — she barely has a taste of her red wine before she is off and running with the first story of the night. Over the next three-and-a-half hours, the Cork woman will tell a lot of them with a gusto that belies her lofty position in American media.

Ciarán Hinds is a big presence, but an avuncular one. I meet him on the unused top floor of an empty building overlooking the sea in Blackrock. He is on the set of RTÉ’s black comedy The Dry – described by one critic as “the Irish Fleabag” – written by Nancy Harris and directed by Paddy Breathnach.

Paul Mescal as Connell Waldron in Normal People (the BBC’s television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel by the same name, with Dublin’s Element Pictures) made a star of the young actor from Maynooth.

I love a rom-com,” says Laura Whitmore. Her husband, comedian and presenter Iain Stirling, is less enamoured with the genre. “He won’t watch a rom-com with me. He’ll watch a horror.“ And? “I won’t watch a horror with him,” she admits. “So, we try to have this balance of a true crime.”