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“... the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ...”

“... to Schrödinger’s cat, within the remit of Bohr’s understanding of quantum mechanics. Denis Brian is intent on portraying Einstein as the archetypal absent-minded professor, and gives a lot of space to his political and pacifist pronouncements, while dealing brutally with his major discoveries. Fölsing is more balanced, recognising that the ...”

“... Security and the Treasury were getting rather cool, she commented: ‘We were frankly puzzled: Brian, David and I all said we got on like a house on fire with Denis Healey and Joel Barnett, even if Edmund was a more difficult customer.’ Denis Healey was forced to make too many ...”

“... Others have written autobiographies. All are full of evidence of the impotence of office. Even Denis Healey in his recent popular autobiography admits that the notorious ‘IMF cuts’ in 1976 were probably based on a false prospectus presented to him by international bankers who knew they were deceiving him. But in all these cases the former Secretaries ...”

“... In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s first novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne gets to know her fellow boarders, especially the landlady’s brother, the returned Yank, Mr Madden. They discuss the difference between men and women in Ireland and America. ‘Guys beating their brains out to keep their wives in mink,’ Mr Madden complains ...”

“... home to me as I was reading Fagles’s Aeneid for this review, when I saw a fine production of Brian Friel’s play Translations at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. The Royal Engineers arrive in County Donegal in 1833 to map the country and to rename its places in the process. The setting is a hedge school, whose master, Hugh O’Donnell, has spent his ...”

“... and savage’) to certain terms bandied about today: ‘terrorist’, ‘bomber’. Brian Friel, another of the ‘Field Day’ directors, does something similar in his play, Translations, which isn’t only about the act of translating place-names from Irish to English, but also ‘translates’ a typical British battalion in the Belfast or ...”

“... Monty also was shown a typescript. He described it as ‘an amazing work’ and wrote to (Sir) Denis Hamilton, editorial director of Kemsleys: ‘My recommendation is that you have nothing to do with the book, and do not buy it for any newspapers in the Kemsley Group. It will do the author no good.’ It was, of course, Correlli Barnett’s The Desert ...”

“... found some support among the new school of ‘War and Society’ historians such as Professor Brian Bond and the present writer, who argued that Haig’s faults were those of the old Army as a whole, and that the problems he faced had baffled European commanders with far greater experience than himself. Nevertheless the popular image remained that ...”

“... avant-garde: ‘An art history which sees Chassériau, Moreau, Gérome, Rodin, Puvis and Maurice Denis as marginal episodes, rather than the most vivid representatives of a vigorous, enduring tradition – that art history will not do.’ For Eisenman, however, it does do – although classicism may have done more to shape his own views than he would care to ...”

“... as misses, and both focus attention on one of the central problems of modern British politics. Brian Sedgemore’s is by far the sillier and more dangerous of the two, but it is also more entertaining and politically the more significant. Mr Sedgemore was Labour MP for Luton in the last Parliament, when he was probably the most intelligent member of the ...”

“... of whisky and ginger ale, ‘but she was never drunk,’ and she did not get through as much as Denis, who could more or less subsist on gin. She didn’t have hangovers and she didn’t get ill (she sometimes had toothache). Her skin continued to glow and her eye remained fierce. More striking than the amount of sleep she needed was her ability to sleep at ...”

“... one issue. Deprived of an outlet, the holy trinity of 1930s poetic Modernism, Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin, took their wares abroad, or went into hibernation (virtually giving up poetry, MacGreevy ended up writing for the Capuchin Annual). Clyde’s book is full of references to crestfallen and ...”

“... according to Tim Heald, her latest biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince Philip,5like the other four biographical subjects she was also a household word in her day. This had nothing to do with hard work and natural ability – as, I would ...”

“... contemplation, spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only ...”