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“... On the last Sunday in July, Darren Graham took off his shirt and walked across the pitch to the dressing-room. He had been playing Gaelic football for Lisnaskea Emmets, his local team in County Fermanagh, against a team from nearby Brookeborough, when someone from the opposing team called him a ‘black cunt’. ‘Black’, in this case, was a reference not to the colour of his skin but to his religion ...”

“... Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention, public fact and private fantasy, the business of government and the spinning of yarns have become utterly indistinguishable. You have made up key aspects of your own biography and seen them reported as fact in the newspapers ...”

“... When, in 1941, Sean O’Faolain wrote to the Irish Times to protest about the ‘miserable fees’ paid by Irish radio for talks by Irish writers, he inadvertently set in train the most nightmarishly savage satire in that paper’s history. O’Faolain’s letter, and the response to it from the impoverished rump that constituted the Irish intelligentsia, led to the foundation by him of WAAMA, the Writers Artists Actors Musicians Association, a short-lived trade union for workers whose services were not exactly regarded as essential ...”

“... In 1925, Sir Cecil Clementi, the British Governor of Hong Kong, wrote a rapturous ode to the colony at night, evoking the illumined streets, the ships glimmering in the harbour, the threads of light circling the Peak that looms above the city, ‘ending where the roadways touch the mountain-crest’. As soon as he had written the word ‘ending’, however, its utter absurdity struck him: Ending? No! For human aspiration Passes here to starry consummation, Mountain roads into the Milky Way ...”

“... I bumped into my brother in the street and we talked about Fintan O’Toole’s book on the beef tribunal. I told him to read it immediately. I myself had stopped both reading about the beef tribunal and eating beef in 1991, after a two-line thing in the Irish Times about cirrhotic calves’ livers being packed by someone, somewhere in Ireland ...”

“... the tribunal system has often been questioned. It ‘has acted as a shock absorber’, Fintan O’Toole argues. ‘It’s been a way of institutionalising, and to an extent controlling, the way revelations come out. It plays out very, very slowly over time so each individual revelation gets dragged out piecemeal. It’s almost like we’ve ...”

“... Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career ...”

“... the minor gentry, Shaw was in his own word a ‘downstart’. In this superbly perceptive study, Fintan O’Toole sees his teetotalism as a reaction to his father’s drinking, just as his manic work rate may have been a riposte to his father’s fecklessness. On one estimate he wrote at least a quarter of a million letters and postcards. Joyce, also ...”

“... on either side. This elaborate scene, a virtual apotheosis of cultural boundary-crossing, opens Fintan O’Toole’s White Savage, on the fascinating career of William Johnson in 18th-century British America. Though well-known to scholars, Johnson’s story has not hitherto received the notice it deserves from the general readers who are clearly ...”

“... has fallen away; today, I doubt whether even the greatest of hams could successfully replace it. Fintan O’Toole posed the right question about the episode in the Irish Times: ‘why, if British identity is so secure, does its pedigree have to be so fantastically exaggerated?’ To compensate for Monarchy-deflation, I’m afraid. ...”

“... peace agreements in history. Without it there could have been no Good Friday Agreement.’ As Fintan O’Toole noted, the agreement made Northern Ireland into ‘a kind of mini EU, a polity that runs, not on unilateral self-assertion, but on painful compromise and awkward consensus’. This isn’t Foster’s style. Her election strategy was to ...”

“... their house inspired and cheered up. Some of the stories were funny. When Stuart began to talk to Fintan O’Toole about his friendship with the poet Paul Potts, and his admiration for him, Fintan thought he was talking about the dictator Pol Pot. He began to imagine Stuart in Paris befriending the future mass murderer ...”

“... it an accident that the managers of the impeachment were both Irishmen? Conor Cruise O’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 arrogantly Protestant English. There is something in this, but ...”

“... it became a liability. In ‘The Southern Question’, his essay on Haughey’s rhetoric, Fintan O’Toole wrote: ‘Charles Haughey’s career in political speech-making begins by accommodating the traditional rhetoric of Fianna Fail – land, Christian values, nationalism – to the rising demands of consumerism, and ends up using that ...”

“... the Irish are the Indians to the far west, circling the wagons of imperial civilisation,’ Fintan O’Toole writes in The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. ‘Once in America, of course, the Irish cease to be the Indians and become the cowboys.’ What Thomson misses when he looks at Ford is the elegiac element in his westerns, the way his static ...”