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“... priest of Irish poetry: ‘a sentimentalist gone sour’.Among McGahern’s circle was the painter Patrick Swift, who in 1960 was in London, co-editing a magazine called X. The following year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of ...”

“... Museum of Art in New York) as well as a long-serving translator who has rendered Raymond Roussel, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras and many others. ‘A good translation,’ he writes, ‘offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the ...”

“... of 19th-century realism, she was largely impervious to the avant-garde experiments of writers like Joyce or Woolf. Nor, for all her bleakness, was she interested in conveying that spirit of sophisticated cultural malaise and psychosexual malfunction so palpable in Hemingway or Fitzgerald. As Acocella puts it, Cather went on giving readers ‘stories about ...”

“... in Dublin and I see him sometimes on the street. We always stop and talk. He loves the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and we talk about that. He remembers some of my family. And he misses it, he says, the diocese and the priests. He looks sad as he moves slowly back towards his lodgings. It would be easy to think as I watch him shuffle away from me that there ...”

“... black novel, no Jewish novel and certainly no gay novel, although a black Caribbean writer such as Patrick Chamoiseau can win the Goncourt and many French writers have been Jewish or homosexual or both. In Britain the situation seems to be located somewhere between the extremes represented by the US and France. High culture in general and gay culture in ...”

“... masters as an accurate indicator of black inferiority; it was the source of his anger at Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family (1965), still an influential guide to public policy, which claimed that a black ‘matriarchy’ deprived young black men of paternal role models and drove them to crime. Social scientists, literary intellectuals ...”

“... is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”

“... the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude nature of the Scottish snowstorm, calling ...”

“... Hunger, Eagleton asks: ‘Where is the Famine in the literature of the Revival? Where is it in Joyce?’ He goes on: ‘If the Famine stirred some to angry rhetoric, it would seem to have traumatised others into muteness. The event strains at the limit of the articulable, and is truly in this sense an Irish Auschwitz.’After Adorno, no more Adornos. It is ...”

“... Waldorf, and writers such as C.A. Lejeune, hired as film critic from the Manchester Guardian, and Joyce Grenfell, who as David’s cousin had presumably been taken on as the paper’s radio critic at her uncle’s suggestion. Waldorf wanted Garvin to like David, and Garvin did his best, but any warmth he managed to manufacture was never returned. ‘One of ...”