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“... 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 ...”

“... of books: Maeve Binchy, Catherine Cookson, Oscar Wilde and more daring authors, such as Edna O’Brien, who were on her father’s ‘forbidden list’. She lost her taste for reading as an adult because she ‘couldn’t concentrate on other people’s stories’, but she scrutinises her fellow patients on the Ward with precision. Instead of using ...”

“... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar ...”

“... there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had ...”

“... themselves to this ‘human interest’ approach than they used to be. Three years ago, Patrick O’Brien, then director of the Institute of Historical Research, disparaged the whole genre of political biography. He argued that ‘just as there are scholars of the performing arts who prefer to contemplate actors rather than acting, players rather than ...”

“... Dublin and New York, and the emergence of a globalised fiction in which America is a base.‘Flann O’Brien was right,’ Deane says at the start of ‘Emergency Aesthetics’. ‘Joyce was invented by Americans. He was part of their foreign policy, of the drive to make the USA a cultural presence and to recruit “high” culture to its mission of world ...”

“... here. ‘But,’ piped up the intellectual, ‘of course it’s true that the anti’s, led by Michael Foot, are completely antediluvian.’ Crossman had by this time come to terms with the fact that, as he had noted in 1952, what the Labour Party ‘really can’t abide is thrashing out Socialist policy among themselves. It is this solidarity which keeps ...”

“... 1918.’ At 20, he joined the brotherhood of freedom-fighters, who now became his closest family. Michael Collins, for whom O’Malley retained a certain sardonic respect, sent him to London to buy arms, and posted him around the Irish countryside to organise and train Volunteer groups. O’Malley found his ideal comrades among the South Tipperary ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”

“... Irish nationalist with socialist leanings, close to Fenianism and even closer to the position of Michael Davitt’. In Inventing Ireland, Kiberd writes: ‘Yet into his own exile Joyce took with him the ancient Gaelic notion that only in literature can the consciousness of the people be glimpsed.’ Again, there is no footnote. Joyce, he writes, ‘attempted ...”

“... Spender was closely involved in manoeuvres within the British branch of the CCF to oust Michael Goodwin, the editor of Twentieth Century, a periodical that had already been covertly subsidised by the Americans to provide an alternative platform in Britain to the ‘pro-Soviet’ New Statesman. Stonor Saunders, whose book tells the story of CCF ...”

“... driven by identification: why else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’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 Holmes to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... untrammelled by international institutions. Trumpeting Bush’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq, Michael Ignatieff recommended in 2003 a new American empire whose ‘grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known’. The United States, Power asserted as Obama’s nominee for US ...”