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“... might arise in connection with the subtitle of James Knowlson’s new biography: ‘The Life of Samuel Beckett’. (The main title looks suspiciously like a publisher’s wheeze, a low-grade spin on Beckett’s desperate formula for the modern artist as doomed to fail or, more tantalisingly, as driven by a ...”

“... caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole). This post-war Paris is largely made up of writers, intellectuals, editors, journalists, actors, jazz musicians, film-makers, students, hangers-on, ‘terrorists’ and the occasional gangster. Several of Campbell’s ...”

“... Lisa Dwan​ has been performing Samuel Beckett’s immensely demanding Not I since 2005. What audiences saw at two short London runs this year, at the Royal Court in January and the Duchess Theatre in February (the production now tours), differed markedly from the published text, though this is not a body of work where experimentation is welcomed ...”

“... nationality has never been in doubt, though this is scarcely true of his friend and compatriot Samuel Beckett. It would be interesting to know how many British university libraries shelve Beckett’s books under French, not Irish, literature. Traitors sell their nationality, whereas writers, if they are ...”

“... Eliot, who detected in the five points ‘a modern emotional attitude which I cannot share’. Samuel Beckett could surely have shared it, however; indeed, with some modifications, it is possible that he still could. Cosmic loneliness, a numbing scepticism and a sense of alienation from the animal facts of life, are all evident aspects of ...”

“... anybody I swear to you on the head of Jesus that it will not be because I am not fond of you.’ Samuel Beckett remarked that anyone wanting to be her lover would find himself an ‘in liu’ – in lieu – ‘man’. Joyce himself commented that Lucia ‘loved her brother in an extraordinary way’, and she fell into shock and depression when he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Faced​ with the threatening possibility of hope, Beckett liked to get his retaliation in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this may have been a slip, allowing the possibility of there having been an ‘up’ from which to come down. Usually his defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation ...”

“... country. And he quickly became a literary force, too. He was the first French publisher to think Samuel Beckett had possibilities, once Beckett began writing in French, and then, in the late 1950s, he took on the authors who together became known for a time as the Ecole de Minuit, before entering literary history as ...”

“... Samuel Beckett was one of the first to realise that in a predominantly agnostic and sceptical age, nothing could be more irrelevant than the novel whose plot continued to imitate the workings of a benign deity: the writer’s new task, on the contrary, consisted in finding ‘a form that accommodates the mess ...”

“... that all the captions are not correct, please turn to page 307. [fr. 286 as p. 47 of Endgame by Samuel Beckett] In your kitchen, on the one hand, bright corpses starting to stink of having an idea, where one of my legs [is] and beneath sooner or later the whole universe doesn’t ring and won’t work. On the other hand, I shouldn’t think so. Nay ...”

“... matters – Oskar Kokoschka, who greatly admired him, Joyce, who owned one of his pictures, and Beckett, who was to be his champion in old age. Despite this Bartlebian attitude, Yeats couldn’t avoid being buffeted by rival claims and clamours. Born into a remarkable family, with a famous elder brother and two talented sisters, his early life was divided ...”

“... for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse, or without remembering for a second that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend Con Leventhal to betake himself ‘to the Dublin Post Office and measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn’s arse’, as Neary in his novel Murphy wished to engage with the arse of the statue of Cúchulainn, the ...”

“... later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald ...”

“... something we can see but not experience: living is necessarily independent of it. In his study of Samuel Beckett, Christopher Ricks says that we desire both oblivion and eternity; but except in the insidiously artificial world of writers like Beckett, who make death a cliché within the life of language, neither of ...”