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“... of continuity – and thus a belief in the continued viability of the pits – to function at all. Francis Beckett and David Hencke quote one journalist’s description of a mining village near Barnsley: The village is not big, nearly all the 300 workers in the pit live here with their families. The wages were never very high … but they have cars and ...”

“... now safely dead and buried: there is no live bear to break out of its cage and retaliate. In 1995 Francis Beckett added his Enemy Within to the growing list of works. His researches were thorough; he had gone round meeting veterans of bygone days, nearly all of whom were happy to chew over their recollections with him. The book has now reappeared with an ...”

“... Between 1947 and 1950 Samuel Beckett and Francis Stuart produced a clutch of novels which extend Irish fiction into the world of Europe. Beckett’s life in wartime Paris is not irrelevant to Molloy, Malone dies and The Unnamable, nor is Stuart’s in wartime Berlin to The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross ...”

“... in this century, it has mostly been used 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 ...”

“... knowledge or knowing, by dint of sensing the world. The recent translation of Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation ought to revivify debates about aesthetics, but it’s likely to meet with the same response from English speakers as previous translations of Deleuze’s extraordinary oeuvre: bewilderment. This response would certainly ...”

“... the saints, Wodehouse was single-minded: to ask what he thought of it all would be like asking St Francis if he was really so attached to brother mouse and sister sparrow. The act of devotion is what counts. My war history has been a simple one. I have just sat in my chair and written all the time. When the Germans occupied Le Touquet I was in the middle of ...”

“... property developers, bent politicians and financial cowboys who made Fred Goodwin look like Francis of Assisi. The nation had screwed up again. Ireland is renowned for two industries: Guinness and Joyce. A good deal of the country’s labour over the years has been devoted to the task of generating fantasies and rendering the population ...”

“... vs. The Rest Of The Artworld’.) A Humument nods quietly at Phillips’s other projects: ghostly, Francis Bacon-like images recall his career as a portrait painter and Royal Academician; sliced photographs invoke his Postcard Century, which portrays each year of the 20th century through hundreds of annotated postcards; and a pasted-in A-Z excerpt features the ...”

“... his own. ‘Invisible Object’ (1934-35) In a commission timed to coincide with the show, Francis Ponge, a poet with a sharp descriptive eye and a gift for comic analogy, was asked to write about Giacometti by Christian Zervos, the founder of Cahiers d’art. Ponge had lately tied himself in knots trying, and failing, to address the topic of ...”

“... psychic liberation. There are three reminiscential character-sketches: ‘The Half Brother’ by Francis Wyndham, an account of a black sheep step-brother; ‘Remembrance’ by Susan Boyd, which touches on the subject of a dead grandmother; and ‘Trotsky’s Other Son’ by Carol Singh, a story describing a Marxist who ran a bookshop in a Nottingham slum in ...”

“... in character pairings – death-driven, addicted to each other – in a way reminiscent of Beckett. The new book is being described as Beckettian for a more obvious reason: it is about two men and they are waiting. But more than Barry’s other work, Night Boat to Tangier feels like a sequel to There Are Little Kingdoms. The elements are all there: the ...”

“... Angel Exhaust. The history of Irish avant-garde journals is even more elusive. There was Francis Stuart and Cecil Salkeld’s To-morrow, which lived up to its title, just about, by struggling to a second issue before expiring. Con Leventhal’s Klaxon arrived in 1924 with Blast-like promises of ‘a whiff of Dadaist Europe to kick Ireland into ...”

“... dominated by issues of national government and sectarian difference. With the exception of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’s essay ‘War and Feminism’ there is no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole ...”

“... had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too often, reviewing was an annex of manners. The triply-named bookman – Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Clutton-Brock, John ...”

“... In March 1992 I received a printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed ...”