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“... in Britain, where, as a South African, he is banned from TV, but bigger than Springsteen or Michael Jackson in France). What would Danton have thought of the Revolution being commemorated by a left-wing South African singing Zulu rock in the South Pacific? Perhaps it’s best we don’t know. One longs, at times, for the more considered attitude of Mao ...”

“... ago. ‘In suburban homes of the late 1950s within commuting distance of Manhattan,’ Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the NYRB in 2019, ‘it was not unusual to come upon a paperback copy of Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century.’ In suburban London homes in the early 1960s it was very unusual indeed. Hecht said he had managed to ‘anger the whole of Great ...”

“... says, In an illuminating page or two of self-analysis (it’s supposed to be about someone called Michael, but his brother is so sure it’s about himself that he changes that name to Patrick): ‘Sometimes he deliberately set out to hate people, and though hating by all the rules of warfare seemed the proper thing to do, it was always a failure with ...”

“... fellow happened to kill someone and provide the occasion for a trial. It’s true, as Conor Cruise O’Brien reminds us, that he does seem to have killed an Arab rather than a person, but it’s also true that he may care more about the Arab than does the settler society that prosecutes him. It’s true too, as Zaretsky shrewdly suggests, that the killer is ...”

“... his superstitiousness. In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was afraid. He ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... with him except through his work and it has always seemed phoney to me.’ On the novelist Kate O’Brien: ‘I find literary people bore me to almost the point of violence.’ On Austin Clarke, the reigning high priest of Irish poetry: ‘a sentimentalist gone sour’.Among McGahern’s circle was the painter Patrick Swift, who in 1960 was in ...”

“... Trump Village, Shore Haven, Beach Haven – for veterans returning to Brooklyn. According to Michael D’Antonio’s delightful new biography, one of Trump père’s schemes was to create an ‘independent company to buy used equipment’ – everything needed on a building site, excavators, tile machines – which he would then lease to his own projects ...”

“... many documents and interviewed dozens of helpful people, many of them now dead. But the assiduous Michael Shelden has found lots more paper, and interviewed not only the survivors on Crick’s list but others whom his predecessor did not come upon. His book is as long as Crick’s and inevitably repeats much that is in the earlier work, so it was all the more ...”

“... and inbred sophistications of Irish literature. One of the most telling essays is written by Michael Hartnett, who, some years ago, switched from writing poetry in English to writing in Irish. Hartnett confesses himself to be ‘obsessed by the work and mind of Daibhi O Bruadair’ (David Broderick or Brouder), the 17th-century poet from the Limerick ...”

“... its Free Statehood: on 2 December 1921 he crossed the Irish Sea from Holyhead on the Cambria – Michael Collins and Erskine Childers, on their way back from the Treaty negotiations in London, were making the same journey. The Cambria collided with a schooner (killing three men) and when Ford arrived in Galway he discovered his ancestral home was in ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... Carson, McGuckian ... the list goes on. Perhaps the most singular omission, though, is that of Michael Longley, whose Poems 1963-83, issued last year by the Salamander Press, shows a poet of incomparable fluency and discernment. When it comes to the Heaney selection (five poems), Kinsella has been rather unenterprising: nothing at all from Station ...”

“... which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a famine in which British bungling and indifference played a considerable part, a sizeable segment of the Irish population was ...”