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“... But, in the interval, he skilfully combines de Valera’s meticulously crafted republicanism with Sean Lemass’s best possible blend of cosmopolitan modernity and ancestral loyalty for present-day Ireland.’Irish writers occasionally take time off from the National Question to contemplate sex or death or to play around with form. But many of their academic ...”

“... the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from Aboriginal languages as well as modern verse in English by poets from a range of racial and ...”

“... and compared with 20th-century Southern Africa, or as ‘attempted integration’, like French rule in Algeria. To what extent did Irish circumstances deflect British aims in, say, the vital decade of the 1790s, when modern notions of nationalism, republicanism and revolution seem firmly to have been implanted? Is the Irish obsession with the past a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... waters, and he was lavishly praised by Priestley, Harold Nicolson, Hugh Walpole, Storm Jameson and Sean O’Faolain. So what else did the poor man want? He wanted to be deeply admired. He wanted to be rated a most excellent and serious writer by the most exacting and serious critics. I never thought of him in that way, although he was the best-known writer in ...”

“... would be interesting to know how many British university libraries shelve Beckett’s books under French, not Irish, literature. Traitors sell their nationality, whereas writers, if they are well-known, find themselves trading on their nationality whether they like it or not. Neither traitors nor imaginative writers can ever fully discard what we choose to ...”

“... among the rivals she most detests. Paglia is fun to read, especially in small doses. Her blasts at French literary theorists and intellectuals, while wildly hyperbolic, are also refreshingly rude, and her passion for popular culture is deeply informed and infectious. In a recent piece in the TLS, ‘Camille Paglia’s Revenge’, the neo-conservative ...”

“... such an awful nook!’). There are hints of American (‘palooka’, ‘hellions’), while anti-French touches of humour turn the devils into ‘seigneurs’ and the divisions within the eighth circle, bolgie, into Parisian ‘arrondissements’. The contrasting idioms uttered by his damned recall the plurality of tongues which Carson has heard in Ulster ...”

“... of Manda, who works in her sister’s hair salon when she isn’t looking after her son, ‘wee Sean’. Manda’s ‘ghastly impregnator’ is out of the picture, which gives her licence to indulge in ‘single-mother martyrdom’ with the other Port girls. Kay, Finn and Ava are at university in Edinburgh and London, studying subjects like architecture and ...”

“... own, of which their producers may know little or nothing. It would be impossible to deduce from Sean O’Casey’s anti-political The Plough and the Stars that its author was a Communist Republican. The logic of the play runs athwart the ideology of the dramatist. A text may carry the signature of a particular writer without being truly part of his or her ...”

“... he learned or taught himself several modern languages, and was particularly strong in German and French. He claimed to understand eight languages and, as Joyce said, he made a liberal parade of his learning: ‘He has read recklessly in many literatures, crossing how many seas, and even penetrated into Peristan, to which no road leads that the feet ...”

“... of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon an international commission of six jurists headed by Sean MacBride undertook a mission to investigate reported Israeli violations of international law during the invasion. The commission’s conclusions were published in Israel in Lebanon by a British publisher: it is reasonably clear that no publisher could or ...”

“... shoots a film in a Seville square at 2 a.m., Jeanne Moreau cooks rabbit in the kitchen of her French farmhouse, Woody Allen has been spreading glue on the parapet of his New York apartment to discourage the pigeons (though the glue served only to discourage them from leaving). Once the talk begins, the claims for its significance seem distinctly ...”

“... theme, as the poems collected in An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed (Dolmen Press, 1981) by Sean O’Tuama and translated by Thomas Kinsella: there, more clearly than anywhere else, we can see what an Irish tradition means by marking its loss. Seamus Deane comes close to this sense of it when he explains that ‘the Irish idea of tradition was naturally ...”

“... in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow. These parades make the Americans look like imbeciles. But, the first page: I wrote it ...”