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“... at one remove, or seeing literary history more panoramically, as he had a preference for doing. Conor CruiseO’Brien once explained to me how Irish writers first train their hopes on London before training them on New York. I’m not Irish and I’m not really at one with America, but I’ve always to some extent ...”

“... of his editor but of three or four other senior staff members as well – notably the columnist Conor CruiseO’Brien, the financial writer William Keegan, and, in all probability, the political editor Adam Raphael. If he hasn’t sacked them yet, it may only be because he finds himself strapped in by the conditions ...”

“... audience fail to recall the rest of that slogan: ein Reich, ein Führer? This of course is what Conor CruiseO’Brien meant when (in an article reported in the German press with astonishment) he warned of a Fourth Reich with a statue to Hitler in every town. (It is no thanks to Dr ...”

“... they are going to look both silly and alarmist. Surely this cannot have been what they intended? Conor CruiseO’Brien once told me that when he took the Irish chair in the United Nations, Ireland having joined rather late, he found his delegation seated alphabetically next to Israel. The Dublin delegates were ...”

“... Conor CruiseO’Brien’s majestic study takes rise from two lines of Yeats: American colonies, Ireland, France and India Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it. The problem is how to use the first line to answer two questions: how did the ‘great melody’ come to be uttered; and what exactly was ‘it’? Yeats answered the latter: Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard’s eye ...”

“... power in 1973, the Irish middle class, new and old, had, in the cabinet, voices of reason, such as Conor CruiseO’Brien and Garret FitzGerald, to lead them away from a notion of their Irish heritage as something dark, catastrophic and violent towards the bright light of European Union and Anglo-Irish Agreement. I went ...”

“... English who failed becomes at once an expiation for and a celebration of the past. It is left to O’Brien to find hope – in changes of attitude in the Republic, in the economic context of the EEC, or in the realism that Bailey, too, sees seeping through cracks in the carapace of Ulster’s dogma. By these latter standards, it is the outsiders who are ...”

“... 1980 that the union with Britain was essential, but has travelled quite a distance since then. Conor CruiseO’Brien, meanwhile, has been voyaging in the opposite direction, setting out as a dutiful supporter of the Anti-Partition League and ending up as undoubtedly the Northern Unionists’ favourite Southern ...”

“... smokescreen behind which to hide increasingly severe socioeconomic repression’. When Conor CruiseO’Brien was prevented by radical students from lecturing at the University of Cape Town in 1986, the University solemnly proclaimed that, by virtue of apartheid, academic freedom did not exist at UCT in any ...”

“... the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor CruiseO’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the killing in the North.’ Not so. It was ...”

“... In March​ 1957 Brian O’Nolan – better known under his pen names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen – then aged 45, applied for a series of jobs at the radio broadcasting studios in Cork, including station supervisor, programme assistant, and balance and control officer. The same month he announced his candidacy for the Irish Senate ...”

“... civil servants, police chiefs – he knows what he is talking about. He is something like Conor CruiseO’Brien in this respect, better informed about government than most novelists and professors. Anthills of the Savannah is comparable with A Man of the People partly because it concerns a statesman under the ...”

“... are more permeable than they are made out to be.’ Karl Miller celebrates the ‘amphibian’ Conor CruiseO’Brien as a particularly striking example of distinction in the academy, in politics and in journalism. Marjorie Perloff offers a spirited demonstration of the incompetence and irresponsibility of much ...”

“... assisted, as he sagely remarks, by the fact that for a considerable time its Northern spokesman, Conor CruiseO’Brien, occupied one end of the spectrum of opinion rather than the centre. An interesting contrast with Britain is that the more militant, ‘Brits Out’ type of sentiment is associated, in the Irish ...”

“... the collar a couple of years ago when he stitched up a deal to buy the paper off an old friend. Conor CruiseO’Brien wrote at the time: ‘I am not going to ask that Mr Rowland’s ink should print on Mr Rowland’s newsprint such words as might induce fits in Mr Rowland. I do not know whether, if I did write such ...”