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“... He grins with browning teeth. ‘There we are at the cashier’s desk in the hall, poor old Mossy O’Brien and myself, I’d been painting the whole week. Bags on the mat. The pony and trap outside on the gravel waiting to take us off to the GS&WR for Dublin. Behind the counter, in her black bombazine and gold chains, old Ma Coughlan, the toughest ...”

“... us to his own ghosts. Two, former British war photographer Tim Page and former American grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and understanding, a search for the ...”

“... opposition to it (albeit for widely differing reasons) Mr Paisley, Mr Gerry Adams, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien and Mr Charles Haughey. Another is that it has divided Fianna Fail into two very unequal sections. Whether this realignment manifests itself in an increase in the number of deaths which litter the North’s daily calendar depends in part on the reaction ...”

“... addressing himself to Irish history and contemporary politics ought always to bear in mind John Stuart Mill’s provocative remark, that it was not Ireland but England that was the exception: ‘Ireland is in the mainstream of human existence and human feeling and experience; it is England that is one of the lateral channels.’ Of the authors under ...”

“... and this is very well done by Anthony Veiller for the Siodmak movie, with uncredited help from John Huston and Richard Brooks. The Siegel film, written by Gene Coon, borrows the plot from the first but transposes scenes and careers: New Jersey, Philadelphia and boxing become Miami, California and car-racing. The stars change too: Burt Lancaster and Ava ...”

“... cracked, does not tell the truth’ – and the resulting distortions are, in a sense, John Wilson Foster’s subject in his impressive new scrutiny of the revival era (roughly the period between 1890 and the early 1930s). The word ‘fictions’ in Foster’s title denotes both fictional themes and concomitant misbeliefs: for example, about the ...”

“... said one of the plain people of the West of Ireland, following the notoriety caused by Edna O’Brien’s fine first novel, The Country Girls, published in 1960. The notoriety was echoed in England: the last of England’s eminent Edwardian novelists, L.P. Hartley, described the novel, she has recalled, as ‘the skittish story of two Irish ...”

“... as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add ...”

“... and skewed when applied to so sporty and brash a critic as Paulin) to his enterprise is John Clare, whose ‘writing becomes a form of Nation Language beating its head against the walls of urbane, polished Official Standard’. At the heart of Clare’s work for Paulin is not only his social eccentricity – too successful for his own ...”

“... of the Thirties almost certainly leads to a distorted view of the poet’s politics. Since John Quinn sent him a volume of selections from Nietzsche in 1902, Yeats had been a fascinated admirer. The Nietzsche he aligned with Blake and Shelley in Ideas of Good and Evil, while acknowledged to be ‘violent’, was clearly on the side of the good angels ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... poets today deny them all. Her Serene Highness is distinctively and successfully present in Sean O’Brien’s poems of workaday life. He envisages, for instance, an ‘hour of general safety’ when you can rest peacefully and Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline. Leave slugs to make free with the pansies in a world where momentarily The ...”

“... in the Eighties. He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor Cruise O’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and anger over, say, Bernard Levin – Britain’s answer ...”

“... In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’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 the Royal Ulster Constabulary who did this, using ...”

“... Why is it,’ asks the mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book about the pitfalls of innumeracy, ‘that a lottery ticket with the numbers 2 13 17 20 29 36 is for most people far preferable to one with the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6?’ It is not an easy question to answer. All lotteries, after all, rely on a recognition by those who participate in them that the winning numbers are chosen at random, if only so that the participants can feel that their numbers have as good a chance of coming up as any others ...”