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“... the limits of the biographical genre, especially when the protagonist is not exercising power. But Roy Foster on young Parnell and Drew McCoy on James Madison as an old man have shown that it is possible to brush a lesser known part of a well known life against the grain, to use it as a way of asking questions. Röhl’s ambition seems more muted. His ...”

“... isolated and besieged, haunted by memories of ancient crimes which refused to be decently buried. Roy Foster has persuasively argued that the Irish Protestant fascination with magic and secret societies reflects a sense of social displacement, but also provided a substitute for Catholic ritual and solidarity. Gothic is the most paranoid of literary ...”

“... to Ireland she sent confidential reports on morale to the British Ministry of Information, though Roy Foster says she was ‘warmly defending neutrality’ in them, ‘as an Irishwoman’. Foster has persuasively made the case for Bowen’s thoroughgoing Irishness – ‘as long as I can remember,’ she ...”

“... One could find quite as many home-grown examples. Even so, the book could have made more of what Roy Foster has called the distinctive ‘savagery of mind’ of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, its semi-crazed pugnaciousness and crudity of spirit. Behind the vindictive rage of a Swift lies the unstable blend of arrogance and insecurity of a second-class ...”

“... the issue of Burke’s Irishness needs problematising. As with those real-life Phineas Finns whom Roy Foster discusses in his essay ‘Marginal Men and Micks on the Make’, it is possible to argue that what was remarkable about Burke was less his angry devotion to Ireland, or the discrimination he suffered on account of this, than the degree to which he ...”

“... hostility. It is questionable how far other nationalists may be willing to go with him in this, as Roy Foster pointed out in the London Review of Books earlier this year (Vol. 4, No 1), and it has to be said that even his reasonableness, extraordinary by nationalist standards, is possibly inadequate by the more dispassionate standards of outsiders. He ...”

“... was a purportedly national insurrection that was significant only in the capital. It was, as Roy Foster provokingly but accurately described it, a putsch. A more genuinely national rebellion might have bequeathed a different legacy: a felt need to atone for inaction at Easter was one of the forces driving the subsequent guerrilla war. Having ...”

“... more. It is not accepted, for example, in Joe Lee’s Ireland: Politics and Society 1912-1986 or Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland. Cultural nationalism did not lead to the Rising, though it may have been in part responsible for it; the executions after the Rising certainly inflamed public opinion, but not as much perhaps as the threat of ...”

“... then, to mount a rigorous chronological reconstruction of Hogg’s life – to do for Hogg what Roy Foster has done for Yeats – would be neither profitable nor possible. Hogg spent decades herding sheep in a wilderness. He was 40 before he played much of a part in the literary life of Edinburgh, 50 before Blackwood’s Magazine hit its stride. How do ...”

“... that two ‘introductions’ were thought necessary. The first (the only one so designated), by Roy Foster, is an informed and thoughtful piece which situates the articles in the context of the modern Irish historiographical revolution and provides an excellent guide to further reading. By contrast, V.G. Kiernan’s ill-informed and oddly ...”

“... the United States in 1963, where he travelled with his friend Marcel Duchamp, and met Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and other young bucks of American Pop art. In My Marilyn (1965) Hamilton adapted, in painting, part of a contact sheet from a photo shoot by George Barris that included her own editorial indications as to which images to cut and what ...”

“... cadaver, a monstrous omen of nuclear horrors to come. Blair, in Shock and Awe (2008), appears in a Roy Rogers shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, with six-shooters and straps that are too big for his short legs. The dioramic space behind him, a fiery purgatory, evokes Baghdad on the first night of ‘Shock and Awe’, but the shock and awe is Blair’s too: they ...”

“... had darkly feared. In Cowper’s eyes – as his early writings amply show – lunacy was not the foster-mother of literature. He had learnt this at first hand: from his youth he had been a chronic depressive, suffering four extended periods of breakdown. The last bout ended with his death, and most of them involved suicide attempts. The first crisis, in 1763 ...”

“... of Lord Randolph Churchill and the brusque treatment that statesman suffered at the hands of Roy Foster comes irresistibly to mind.) Albert liked Peel not only for his high seriousness, sense of public duty and moral commitment to the welfare of the mass of the people: what he also (and more materially) liked him for was the fact that they shared a ...”

“... and once in a delicate line-drawing of the 1950s, by Robert Rhodes James. But all this time, as Roy Foster’s book makes plain, another Lord Randolph has lain concealed by the conventions of portraiture. Winston, to whom his father was a divinity but also a stranger, wanted to prove that Lord Randolph possessed all the attributes of the ideal ...”