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“... Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men ...”

“... Life,​ for the narrators of Joseph O’Neill’s five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage ...”

“... Part Two), you’d better follow through with something formidable – as Under the Volcano does. Joseph O’Neill’s second epigraph for his new novel, The Dog, is from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (‘I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved’), his first from Macbeth: ‘Here’s the smell of the blood ...”

“... for Hades. The ambiguous title fits a novel remarkable for its complex geographical situation. Joseph O’Neill, with his mixed Irish and Turkish parentage, and a childhood spent partly in the Hague, now lives in New York City. Hans is more simply Dutch, born and raised. His wife, Rachel, is English, though she gives birth to their son in New ...”

“... Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was mostly done in Connecticut; or that Kerouac might have written On the Road ...”

“... or a kinder, gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ideas. Why not try to be James Joyce? A bit wobbly and lopsided by design, NW is a hotchpotch in five ...”

“... a space that very soon became a single compacted block, an uncelebrated curation in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, or Phyllida Barlow’s recent mounds at Tate Britain. The higher they stack the investment silos of target architecture, the more those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly ...”

“... doses of laudanum, an abuse which he continued until his death. In October 1868, Caroline married Joseph Clow. Why is mysterious. Clarke suggests it was a bluff on her part that backfired. Even more mysterious is that Wilkie attended the wedding – an act of extraordinary impudence. Nine months later Martha Rudd bore Wilkie’s first child. By the time she ...”

“... Hunt and nine local leaders were tried at York for high treason; Samuel Bamford, John Knight, Joseph Healey and Joseph Johnson were sentenced to a year in prison on the lesser charge of seditious conspiracy; Hunt got two and a half years. The repercussions of the legislation and the trial were felt nationally, and the ...”

“... It was late Friday afternoon and a group of young salarymen were ordering a round of what Joseph O’Neill called ‘the gold-and-white gadgets that are Dutch glasses of beer’. Groen stood out with his hoodie and his exhaustion. ‘The TNT strategy was “We want to be one of the big players, like FedEx or UPS,” and it failed, of ...”

“... Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton ...”

“... The Surrealists​ liked to proclaim that everyone who dreams is a poet, and Joseph Beuys that everyone who creates is an artist. So much for the utopian days of aesthetic egalitarianism; maybe the best we can say today is that everyone who compiles is a curator. We curate our favourite photographs, songs and restaurants, or use numerous websites and applications to do it for us ...”

“... nature’. There are laureates who are unequivocally deserving on straight literary criteria – O’Neill, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Singer, Bellow, Morrison. There are others – Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck and John Steinbeck – for whom non-literary factors seem to have been at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have ...”

“... failure. On the strength of that one film I would love to read a thorough life of Ford (such as Joseph McBride managed for Frank Capra, that other fragile hero). The reasons Ford ‘has such defenders’ are amply supplied in the book McBride has now written about him, which shows how we might do better not to understand our enemies too quickly, how even ...”

“... Sloane not just for Sloane Square and milk chocolate, but for the Natural History Museum. Without Joseph Banks and Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace we would not understand how acutely dependent we are on nature’s goods and services, and it was the Swedish chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Svante Arrhenius who, a hundred years ago, first discussed the ...”