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“... Lawn’, the Irish Times column written, on and off, for almost a quarter of a century by Flann O’Brien (or, if you prefer, Myles na Gopaleen, or Brian O’Nolan). My favourite has always been the catechism of cliché. When things are few, what also are they? Far between. What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low? Running. How low are ...”

“... In March​ 1957 Brian O’Nolan – better known under his pen names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen – then aged 45, applied for a series of jobs at the radio broadcasting studios in Cork, including station supervisor, programme assistant, and balance and control officer. The same month he announced his candidacy for the Irish Senate ...”

“... again,’ declared one of them, Tomas O Crohan, in 1926: this elegiac phrase was latched onto by Flann O’Brien, in his satiric denunciations of Irish falsity or self-dramatisation wherever it cropped up, whether with Gaelic Leaguers or island autobiographers. Between Synge of the exorbitant syntax and ...”

“... by Irish writers: by Joyce, with Vico and scatology, by Beckett, with velleity and bananas, and by Flann O’Brien, one paragraph of whose At-Swim-Two-Birds includes both an argumentum on Rousseau and the sudden eructation of ‘buff-coloured puke’. Now there is a new practitioner, working with a different vernacular and a different elevated ...”

“... The writers were Fernando Pessoa, born 1888, died 1935; Jorge Luis Borges, born 1899, died 1986; Flann O’Brien, born 1911, died 1966. Each of them was brought up not only in a shadow country and city, or a place that felt as though it lived now in the shade, but also with two or more languages and with an often disruptive relationship between the ...”

“... exactly regarded as essential. WAAMA inspired the Times columnist Myles naGopaleen (the novelist Flann O’Brien) to an extended fantasy that raised the dilemma of the artist in post-Independence Ireland to Swiftian heights of terror and disgust. In O’Brien’s vision, WAAMA, seeking work for the horde of unemployed ...”

“... The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross. Ten years earlier Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien, had written At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman. These two works, of which only the first was published in the author’s lifetime, differ from those of Beckett and Stuart in many ways, not least in the sharp, impersonal brevity of ...”

“... book, A Colder Eye, a study of the modern Irish writers from Yeats, Joyce and Synge to Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Kenner encourages his reader, an American apparently, to believe that Ireland is a crazy country from which, believe it or don’t, a number of extraordinary writers have emerged. Their emergence testifies to the fact, I gather, that nations ...”

“... and she wanted him. Enright has been described as the Mary Tyler Moore Show scripted by Flann O’Brien, but although she is an eloquent writer and can be dazzlingly funny, she belongs to the present century and the company of, say, Kate Atkinson. For Enright the recognisable dimensions of time, speech and thought (though not place) are fluid ...”

“... In At Swim-Two-Birds the characters murder their creator (who is, in turn, fictional – Flann O’Brien doesn’t entirely succumb to sado-masochism) and then write their own novel in which he is brought back to life, tried and then tortured. Odd-job man Clifford Bickerton isn’t any happier about being a character in In the Approaches, a ...”

“... explanation for what Irish fiction has achieved in its more experimental modes (Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien). In addition, since Ireland had for so long offered descriptions of itself as a traditional community, and since these had been reinforced by different groups pursuing their own agendas, its Modernism in literature was bound to sit rather ...”

“... universal and Homeric has been a central preoccupation of modernist Irish writers: Yeats, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and, arguably, Beckett, have all made Iliads of local rows. Heaney, in a somewhat different manner, shares this preoccupation, as these Selected Poems, chosen by himself from the volumes of poetry he published before Field Work, attest. For ...”

“... them, but Jackson shows that we do both at once. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sendak, Flann O’Brien proposed a marginalia-faking service for nouveaux riches who’d bought up libraries they had no intention of reading: ‘suitable passages in not less than 50 per cent of the books to be underlined in good-quality red ink and an appropriate ...”

“... and at least a fleeting trace of Cold Comfort Farm: ‘them do say as she’s a witch.’ And of Flann O’Brien. Convolvulus continually threatens to smother the phlox. Simpletons, saints and grotesques face a ubiquitous aggression and duplicity – and it is a welcome stroke when the worthless nephew to whom the brothers plan to bequeath their farm is ...”

“... it seems, is a subscriber to the theory outlined if not first, then at least most cogently, by Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds: ‘Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as ...”