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“... and games. We are all well. I was gugering for Uncle Pat Thursday.        Goodbye from Sean to DaddyAt the time, McGahern and his siblings were living in Aughawillan, County Leitrim, with their mother. Their father, a sergeant in the Gardaí, lived some distance away and visited occasionally. He appears in McGahern’s early novels – The Barracks ...”

“... De Paor is closest to the traditional Romantic outlook. His writing is sometimes reminiscent of Sean O’Faolain’s vigorous study of The Irish (1947), a book which its author described in the uncomplicated idiom of forty years ago as a ‘creative history of the growth of a racial mind’. Seamus Deane, by contrast, offers a political reading of cultural ...”

“... of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). During the three centuries covered in this book, the destruction of Gaelic Ireland was deplored as it was taking place, in the mordant ...”

“... poem, ‘Women’s Christmas’, was also printed in the books section. This was a translation of Sean Ó Riordáin’s ‘Óiche Nollaig na mBan’, about the feast day on 6 January when women traditionally gathered to socialise without men. ‘There was power in the storm that escaped last night,/last night on Women’s Christmas/from the desolate madhouse ...”

“... he wrote, ‘a marvellous book – so much better than my own Power and the Glory’. To Flann O’Brien: ‘At-Swim-Two-Birds has remained to my mind ever since it first appeared one of the best books of our century.’ To Roald Dahl: ‘I have just finished reading Boy with immense pleasure and great horror.’ To Brian Moore: ‘I always remember our ...”

“... his well-informed introduction, to place Deane in the company of such writer-critics as Yeats and Sean O’Faolain. Somewhere near his core, though, he was an Enlightenment rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After ...”

“... the Irish middle class, new and old, had, in the cabinet, voices of reason, such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Garret FitzGerald, to lead them away from a notion of their Irish heritage as something dark, catastrophic and violent towards the bright light of European Union and Anglo-Irish Agreement. I went to secondary school in 1967, the first year of free ...”

“... grandeur, Máire Mhac an tSaoi has her own elevated co-ordinates. She is married to Conor Cruise O’Brien. Her father, Sean McEntee, fought in the Irish War of Independence and was a minister in most of Eamon de Valera’s Governments. Her uncle was a cardinal. Every schoolchild of my generation knew her poems, written in ...”

“... Witt dreams of a life close to nature among the Melanesian islanders, while Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn) holds the view that each man should look out for himself, had better make himself an island. And yet a sense of connection between these men comes across, in no small part because of the collectivity of voices, inner voices linking soldiers outwardly ...”

“... 1964) – he was the first Unionist prime minister to do so – and for receiving Sean Lemass, the Irish taoiseach, at Stormont. In reality, O’Neill was never much of a cake-sharer. His attitude to Catholics – and to working-class Protestants, for that matter – was patrician. ‘It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants,’ he ...”

“... as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to create a male character who was neither comic nor lying on ...”