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“... the generation after Joyce and after political independence, tore away at Ireland from within – Sean O’Faolain, Liam O’Flaherty, Patrick Kavanagh and Frank O’Connor – he alone mauled its vulgarity and provincialism in the formal modernity and impersonality of his work. Seamus Deane has described how an Irish literature of dissent registers ...”

“... with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time. He made a joke about it, which she considered in poor taste and there was a subsequent cooling in their relationship. It was to be his last visit to her house and the first change of partners in a ...”

“... waters, and he was lavishly praised by Priestley, Harold Nicolson, Hugh Walpole, Storm Jameson and Sean O’Faolain. So what else did the poor man want? He wanted to be deeply admired. He wanted to be rated a most excellent and serious writer by the most exacting and serious critics. I never thought of him in that way, although he was the best-known ...”

“... his talent between lyrics and satires such as ‘The Wake of the Books’ (in which O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain and Austin Clarke appear as characters), ‘The Christmas Mummers’ and ‘The Paddiad’ (in which he himself appears as ‘Paddy Conscience’). As Antoinette Quinn puts it in her introduction to the new Collected Poems, ‘the satires ...”

“... social machinery’ or intricate tapestry of manners which his native America lacked, while Sean O’Faolain can be found making much the same complaint about stagnant, spiritually oppressive Ireland. It was, he remarked, too ‘thin’ a society for fiction, more attractive to the anthropologist than the man of letters. James Wood sees Pritchett ...”

“... for some time before this, and in the wake of the major achievements of the Revival, writers like Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor had been reflecting Catholicism like billy-o, as a force to be repudiated or encouraged, or just in acknowledgement of its inescapability. Hadn’t the time arrived to dispense with sectional assertion in any interests ...”

“... than the opposition to co-operating in a British war effort. In the main, Seán O’Faolain was right to describe Irish opinion as anti-British but pro-Allied. Neutrality has to be actively maintained; far from denoting government passivity, it requires intense and sustained intervention. Established rights and freedoms were suppressed, with ...”

“... his well-informed introduction, to place Deane in the company of such writer-critics as Yeats and Sean O’Faolain. Somewhere near his core, though, he was an Enlightenment rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic ...”

“... about it. In the 1940s, opposition to censorship was centred in the Bell, a periodical edited by Sean O’Faolain, and in the pages of the Irish Times. Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices was banned in 1941, on the basis of the single sentence: ‘She saw Etienne and her father in the embrace of love.’ She was the only Irish writer to appeal the ...”

“... in his eyes. He stopped eating – another kind of Irish fasting to add to those described here by Sean O’Faolain – complained that ‘this dying’ was ‘weary work’, and according to Alice’s new friend Katharine Loring, got over ‘the delay in dying by asserting that he [had] already died’. His last words were for his sons – ‘such good ...”

“... once more with no job, no prospects, no qualifications. In the 1930s, as Moore later recalled, Sean O’Faolain argued that the only possible dénouement of an Irish novel was that ‘the hero gets on the boat and goes to England.’ Moore, who from an early age had wanted to be a writer, had two reasons for going to Canada. One, he had fallen in love ...”

“... De Paor is closest to the traditional Romantic outlook. His writing is sometimes reminiscent of Sean O’Faolain’s vigorous study of The Irish (1947), a book which its author described in the uncomplicated idiom of forty years ago as a ‘creative history of the growth of a racial mind’. Seamus Deane, by contrast, offers a political reading of ...”

“... of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). During the three centuries covered in this book, the destruction of Gaelic Ireland was deplored as it was taking place, in the mordant ...”

“... an tSaoi has her own elevated co-ordinates. She is married to Conor Cruise O’Brien. Her father, Sean McEntee, fought in the Irish War of Independence and was a minister in most of Eamon de Valera’s Governments. Her uncle was a cardinal. Every schoolchild of my generation knew her poems, written in Irish, by heart. She is a formidable presence at any ...”