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“... government of India. Is it an accident that the managers of the impeachment were both Irishmen? Conor CruiseO’Brien and Fintan O’Toole have argued that it was not; for ‘India’ read ‘Ireland’, and vice versa: both native populations – Hindu or Catholic – were subject to the imperial rapacities of the ...”

“... despised. This stylish gesture and his Orphic death made him a model for others, not least for Conor CruiseO’Brien, who wrote Maria Cross, became Ireland’s ambassador at the United Nations and led UN troops into battle in Katanga. I remember O’Brien climbing onto a table in ...”

“... with this I arrive at a famous attempt to connect Irish affairs with a European crisis, namely Conor CruiseO’Brien’s bid to link the Black and Tans to the Nazis. This remarkable essay is for most of its duration going in a different direction, since it offers a rebuke to all those readers of Yeats who like to ...”

“... Visiting​ Africa and Asia in the 1960s, Conor CruiseO’Brien discovered that many people in former colonies were ‘sickened by the word “liberalism”’. They saw it as an ‘ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs ...”

“... enthusiasm for the cause of anti-imperialism. How else to explain the astonishing reversal of Conor CruiseO’Brien, who wrote the first really devastating critique of Camus as an accomplice of French colonialism in Algeria, and then a few years later enlisted as a defender of Menachem Begin’s Israel, Ulster ...”

“... persons to live and breathe in his fiction. This is​ a longstanding objection to La Peste. Conor CruiseO’Brien felt in 1970 that the ‘native question is simply abolished’ by the absence of Algerians from the novel, even though we assume they’re dying in larger numbers than the French. Things had gone ...”

“... and his superstitiousness. In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor CruiseO’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 ...”

“... flourished, among Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins, playing the part of an anti-Anti-Jacobin (much as Conor CruiseO’Brien used to be an anti-Anti-Communist, before he found other fish to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on ...”

“... Battle of Burke’. Here he reflects another distinguished Irish political pilgrim from the left, Conor CruiseO’Brien; the combination of Burke’s conservative views on revolution and representation, and the clarity of his realisation that the iniquitous position of Irish Catholics had to be radically reformed in ...”

“... is often driven by identification: why else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor CruiseO’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led ...”

“... of criticism by John Davies, the City Editor, over the Lonrho-House of Fraser negotiations. Conor CruiseO’Brien was characteristically frank in writing in his column for the paper that it would be absurd for anybody to suppose that he would feel he could write as freely about Lonrho once it owned the paper as ...”

“... added’. It isn’t clear that any one of these options would have satisfied the critics.When Conor CruiseO’Brien noted the absence of Arabs from The Plague, he was joining a long trail of critique. Feminists would add their objection to the novel’s representation of women. It opens with Rieux’s wife in ...”

“... let alone socialism. Western liberals were widely perceived as ‘false friends’, as Conor CruiseO’Brien reported from Africa in the 1960s, and liberalism itself as an ‘ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs’. Distrust of the Western discourse of ...”

“... of Irish grandeur, Máire Mhac an tSaoi has her own elevated co-ordinates. She is married to Conor CruiseO’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 ...”

“... seem beside the point. ‘I have read many pessimistic analyses of “Northern Ireland”,’ Conor CruiseO’Brien wrote in sombre admiration, ‘but none that has the bleak conclusiveness of these poems.’Heaney had made a remarkably successful debut with Death of a Naturalist (1966) and his subsequent books ...”