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“... describing Williams as an absurdist or surrealist (though I often think of Leonora Carrington, Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein while reading her). The narration is too homely, driven by idiosyncrasy, intimacy, and the valiant effort to maintain dignity. Besides, the sentences that come out of our mouths are routinely weirder than those we think to ...”

“... of Joyce’s Work in Progress (later known as Finnegans Wake), as well as early texts by Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, H.D., Laura Riding and Paul Bowles. Sarraute found a kindred spirit in Jolas, someone who shared her own aesthetic sensibilities. She would remain a lifelong friend, and later became Sarraute’s translator. Jolas and her friends ...”

“... away.If there are other writers who competed as professional runners, I’m not aware of them. (Samuel Beckett was a good sprinter but that was in his schooldays.) To Coppard, the importance of running was that it taught him he was best over a short distance, a lesson he applied to his fiction. Though he published many collections of stories, he never ...”

“... most part on the fringes of the theatrical world, dreaming of becoming the next Sean O’Casey or Samuel Beckett. Ann Sevitt’s engagement to Tom O’Brien produced strains within the family, but were as nothing compared to the firestorm generated by Celia’s engagement to Jim Prendergast. Celia persuaded Elizabeth to throw an engagement party at the ...”

“... the kettle on, then realises that the sound is coming from the kettle. It is not for nothing that Samuel Beckett was Irish. Long Time, No See is set in the same social and natural world as A Goat’s Song, but not in the same literary one. Among its cast list are the narrator Mister Psyche (known to a local Pole as Mister Side Kick), the Blackbird, Miss ...”

“... Ethics’ – frequently recalls other masters of strange, urgent sentences: Monty Python; Samuel Beckett; Chris Morris in Blue Jam; and perhaps most vividly of all, Vivian Stanshall in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. In fact, A Humument is a novel of quotation: not only in the sense that all of its words were written first by Mallock (although ...”

“... The less there is to see, the more there is to say. Such might be the motto of the Beckett enthusiast. An ingenious recent article by James Hansford devotes almost twenty pages to a story whose original manuscript consists of a bare page of typescript,1 But the apparent-neglect of due critical economy is easily explained by the character of Beckett’s corpus of writings ...”

“... way to the plainer, more disenchanted idiom of Patrick Kavanagh, or the self-parodic minimalism of Samuel Beckett, so fearful of writing Hiberno-English that he ceased to write in English altogether. Colm Tóibín’s austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing else, belongs to this anti-Revivalist legacy, as do ...”

“... in space and time ever occupied by the beloved.47. There is no right or wrong in Proust, says Samuel Beckett, and I believe it. The bluffing, however, remains a grey area. 48. Let’s return to the transposition theory.49. On 30 May 1914, French newspapers reported that Alfred Agostinelli, a student aviator, fell from his machine into the ...”

“... William King, Edward Synge, Philip Skelton, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. Sterne, Joyce and Beckett classify the world compulsively, but only to make a mockery of the whole futile business. Walter Shandy, the obsessive rationalist of Sterne’s great novel, is clearly insane. Seduced by an image of pure reason, Gulliver ends up in much the same ...”

“... Random House Book of 20th-Century French Poetry (1982), where the English-language version is by Samuel Beckett. ‘Zone’ begins, like ‘Prufrock’, by signalling a determination to move beyond 19th-century diction and imagery – ‘A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien,’ rendered by Beckett as ‘In the end ...”

“... Kenner replied. During this period Kenner published two books on T.S. Eliot, a critical study of Samuel Beckett and The Pound Era, his masterwork (to which Davenport provided considerable input, including the gnomic final sentence: ‘Thought is a labyrinth’), along with several other books, including The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy which had ...”

“... alphabet. The generous range of Mercier’s pieces, from 18th-century Gaelic antiquarianism to ‘Samuel Beckett and the Bible’, thus comes as a timely reminder of the limits of fashion. As Declan Kiberd remarks in an affectionate Introduction, Mercier was one of the last of the gentleman scholars, and one does not turn to his work for path-breaking ...”

“... was a period of extraordinary activity during which the museum hosted off-Broadway productions of Beckett and Albee, a two-week course in painting from Elaine de Kooning, Lightnin’ Hopkins in concert and a festival of poetry featuring Kenneth Koch, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Bly. Most fun of all, Barthelme organised an exhibition, New American Artefacts: The ...”

“... further unhappiness. We hope for small mercies for McGahern’s characters. He is something of a Samuel Beckett writing in relative longhand, less emblematically and, I would say, more humanly. One of his ostensibly more enterprising characters, who has escaped to work in the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, comes home on leave with habitual ...”