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“... Susann’s ambition as a schoolgirl ‘was to own a mink coat’, and in the early 1970s Samuel Beckett used a ‘now classic leather Gucci hobo holdall as his day-to-day man bag’. Beckett, Newman suggests, would have been an ideal model for Comme des Garçons and with that thought in mind a photograph of ...”

“... There is a moment in Samuel Beckett’s story ‘The Expelled’ in which the hero watches a funeral pass: Personally if I were reduced to making the sign of the cross I would set my heart on doing it right, nose, navel, left nipple, right nipple. But the way they did it, slovenly and wild, he seemed crucified all of a heap, no dignity, his knees under his chin and his hands anyhow ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy at the age of ...”

“... what my last words will be, written, the others do not endure, but vanish, into thin air.’ Beckett’s Dying Words is not a study of Beckett’s dying words if he said any, or of Malone’s. It is about words spoken or written in the vicinity of death, responsive to a conviction of their own death – a death which ...”

“... concept of the ‘infra-thin’, like mist on glass, or the warmth of a seat just vacated. Samuel Beckett wrote in The Unnameable: ‘It is all very well to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.’ They are all, it turns out, a little different, and none of them pure or (as Susan Sontag put it) raw. Among the ...”

“... to the window. I had never been that close to a wild bird before. When the Irish patrol vessel Samuel Beckett arrived in darkness to take the dead man from our boat, there was no ritual, only a haphazard transfer by stretcher as the winds picked up. We passed over a single slip of paper with the only information we knew of him. Just the date and time ...”

“... after two weeks the producers pulled the plug. The broadcast found a more receptive listener in Samuel Beckett, who wasn’t only in favour of an art of last gasps but had recently been brooding on radio drama as a pure play of sound and silence. ‘Merveilleux, merveilleux,’ he wrote the same day in a note to Duras, whom he didn’t know. Two days ...”

“... way, and in 1834 it published perhaps the single most influential Irish book review ever written, Samuel Ferguson’s attack on Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy. The review, which was spread over four issues, criticised primitive cultural nationalism and formed a platform for the soon to emerge Irish Revival. All through the 19th century, Irish magazines ...”

“... Beckett our contemporary – readers and audiences undoubtedly respond to him as a contemporary – is all the same very much a creature of the Twenties. He is the last great Modernist. His plays make use of Twenties techniques: hypnotic spotlights, loudspeakers, expressionistic props and highly-organised speech rhythms ...”

“... At the turning point of this second volume of Beckett’s letters, which is also the turning point of his professional life, the moment when, after so many years of ‘retyping … for rejection’, his best work is finally to be published with enthusiasm by editors determined to let the world know what they have discovered, the author’s partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, writes to Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit to advise that Beckett does not wish his novel to be entered for the Prix des Critiques ...”

“... this formulation isn’t as dire as ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ Nauman does share with Samuel Beckett (another early influence) a wicked sense of stark humour. In his short film Square Dance (1967-68) Nauman steps around a rectangle taped on his studio floor in a deadpan manner that both parodies the modernist obsession with this geometric ...”

“... are writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter ... Samuel Beckett (of course), John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe ...”

“... Macbeth is short enough, but noting the inordinate length of many of Shakespeare’s other plays Samuel Ferguson offered the public a volume of Shakespearian Breviates in 1882, cutting each play down to two hours. ‘Perhaps nothing the man has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance,’ Arthur Deering wrote in Sir ...”

“... hack our way through no less than eight quotations from sources as diverse as Meister Eckhardt and Samuel Beckett. What is the function of all this cultural scaffolding? Does the writer doubt the validity of his own insights? Does he feel that Beethoven gains from this metaphysical propping-up? Professor Mellers answers this right at the start: Since ...”