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“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles ...”

“... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...”

“... offer new interpretations of two men, each of whom dominated the politics of his time, Daniel O’Connell and Eamon de Valera. Their relevance to the current crisis is most apparent in the way each had to come to terms with the problems which sectarian polarisation, on the one hand, and militant extremism, on the other, pose for Irish nationalist ...”

“... rely on the support of the people’. In September 1837 he wrote to his brother-in-law about O’Connell: ‘If I had thought that the result of the Reform Bill was to be the raising of a new Rienzi, and to make his dictatorship and the democracy of the towns paramount to all the other interests of the state, I would have died before I would have ...”

“... IRA leadership itself was not of one mind: it included flexible pragmatists such as Dave O’Connell, and hardliners, most prominently the chief of staff, Seán Mac Stiofáin. The Provisionals’ policy (formulated largely by O’Connell and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh of Sinn Féin) concentrated not on Irish unity, but ...”

“... guys were duped and let down, while the last two died in their beds, full of Irish honours. Thus O’Connell and Parnell seem to react primarily to English stimuli, and the autonomous growth of Sinn Fein occurs in a chapter given over largely to the transactions of Asquith and Balfour with the Nationalists. The non-sectarian socialism preached by Larkin and ...”

“... were once plentiful in Dublin. I became interested in a gloss on page 1230 which states that ‘Michael Begnal suggests, perhaps not entirely seriously, that she [Martha Clifford, from whom Bloom receives a letter] is actually Ignatius Gallaher.’ This thesis, we learn from the copious bibliography, was first aired by Begnal in the James Joyce Quarterly in ...”

“... honest manner which is never to be trusted’, as Melbourne advised the young Queen Victoria. O’Connell compared Peel’s smile to the silver plate on a coffin. Samuel’s ‘sense of humour’, Beatrice Webb noted, ‘takes the irritating form of tactless irony at the expense of the people he is talking to’. It is a feat to have dealt perceptively ...”

“... can make you laugh out loud. I was particularly drawn to one figure in Zach Sodenstern’s Gunther O’Connell saga, ‘a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies’. ‘He tried desperately to make friends,’ we hear of a literary editor, ‘but enemies were all he ever had.’ The Duchess of Bahamontes was ‘a fine gardener ...”

“... the Irish history we studied was parliamentary and constitutional. The 19th century was made up of O’Connell and Parnell, and there was much emphasis on their time at Westminster. Young Ireland, the Fenians, even the poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. ...”

“... internal politics of the IRA and describes the tensions between Dublin intellectuals like David O’Connell and the Belfast leaders. As in his account of Loyalist terrorism, he both analyses the movement’s theoretical ideas and describes some of their murderous acts. His work is not polemical and it is remarkable as much for its open-mindedness as for its ...”

“... active and gentlemanly-looking; his age is about 30 years.’ Such was the picture of the young Michael Davitt, Fenian suspect, produced by the police detective who was watching him in 1869. (In fact, he was working-class, and 24 years old.) Somewhat later, after seven years’ penal servitude, he was seen by the Irish Parliamentarian F.H.O’Donnell as ...”

“... movement saw themselves as armed militants to the Officials’ political compromisers. For them, Michael Collins had said all there was to say about the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it ...”

“... there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in ...”

“... him, however, and when the family moved to Dublin in 1905 he attended the Christian Brothers’ ‘O’Connell School’, the nursery of several other revolutionaries. His brothers joined the British Army, his parents remained opposed to Sinn Fein, and at the time of the Easter Rising O’Malley himself was enrolled (on a prestigious scholarship) as a medical ...”