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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... illusions were quickly shattered. In the event, Ireland’s first representatives in Paris were Sean T. O’Kelly and George Gavan Duffy. O’Kelly, who had been a member of Dublin Corporation for many years, represented the Dáil Government in Paris from 1919 until his dismissal in 1922, but also spent a brief period in Rome in the summer of 1920. He was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A Colder Eye, a study of the modern Irish writers from Yeats, Joyce and Synge to Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Kenner encourages his reader, an American apparently, to believe that Ireland is a crazy country from which, believe it or don’t, a number of extraordinary writers have emerged. Their emergence testifies to the fact, I gather, that nations sometimes ...”

“... the small hours, usually ending with a round of Irish rebel songs, lead by the melodious tenor of Sean Malarkey, a shy man who had to be prevailed on to sing. One night he regaled us with an anti-colonial number that included the line ‘Out, out, ye Saxon dogs’. An Englishman called Don Griffin, who, like my father at the time, worked as a guard for ...”

“... of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross. Ten years earlier Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien, had written At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman. These two works, of which only the first was published in the author’s lifetime, differ from those of Beckett and Stuart in many ways, not least in the sharp, impersonal brevity of O’Nolan’s ...”

“... Paris correspondent of the Times, those at Yeats’s graveside included ‘Mrs Yeats, Mr Dermod O’Brien, the President of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, and Lady Gerald Wellesley, the poetess’. In February 1947, my grandparents again made the trip to the South of France, accompanied this time by their teenage daughters. My mother recalled her ...”

“... this subliminal vision can hardly be overstated. It creates the view of partition, as Conor Cruise O’Brien put it, not just as ‘a wrong’ but as ‘wrong’. This simple fact helps to explain how the persistent failure of nationalists to build bridges to the North has been paralleled by their uncanny success in ‘eliciting the siege reflex’ – by ...”

“... for what Irish fiction has achieved in its more experimental modes (Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien). In addition, since Ireland had for so long offered descriptions of itself as a traditional community, and since these had been reinforced by different groups pursuing their own agendas, its Modernism in literature was bound to sit rather oddly with ...”

“... remembered in an authentically modern prose, comparable to the fiction of that same generation by Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor and Liam O’Flaherty. Other auto-biographical writers (or non-writers) like Barry and Breen had produced naive, highly-coloured morality tales, written in an idiom derived from the 19th-century nationalist tracts excoriated by ...”

“... with self-denial, contemplation, spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ...”

“... about it. In the 1940s, opposition to censorship was centred in the Bell, a periodical edited by Sean O’Faolain, and in the pages of the Irish Times. Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices was banned in 1941, on the basis of the single sentence: ‘She saw Etienne and her father in the embrace of love.’ She was the only ...”

“... throw over the enterprise. He would go on to write critiques both of the modern Irish state in the Sean Lemass era and of power relations in Northern Ireland (in collaboration with other figures from Northern Ireland’s leftist intelligentsia), to redefine the attempted politics of reconciliation in the Edwardian era and to continue the story of land struggle ...”

“... his ancestral home was in flames. McBride tells the story well, drawing on a letter Ford wrote to Sean O’Casey in 1936: He wrote that upon arriving in Spiddal, he went directly to the thatched cottage of his cousin Michael Thornton, a country schoolteacher and IRA leader. Ford was astonished to find the Thornton home engulfed in flames. Michael’s aged ...”