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“... pretty bad too. The date seems to be the present, there are glassy skyscrapers everywhere, and Sean Penn seems to be a mid-career architect. We can’t be sure of this because he doesn’t do anything, just sits in meetings thinking about his murderous Oedipal days as a boy, and occasionally wandering through mental landscapes represented by deserts and ...”

“... Gus Van Sant’s new film, Milk, is thoughtful, patient, funny and touching, and both Sean Penn and James Franco should get Oscars, but it doesn’t answer the questions any biopic raises for me: what’s it for and why now? Or perhaps it does have the answers, but we have to do our own digging for them. Harvey Milk was an elected official of the city of San Francisco, said to be the first openly gay man to hold public office in the United States ...”

“... too thin-skinned altogether.’ The latter, Dolan notes, is spoken by Seumas in Act 1, line 87 of Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman. ‘The main intention of this dictionary,’ I’m only after reading in the introduction (only after is another Gaelic construction), ‘is to make accessible the common word stock of Hiberno-English in both its present ...”

“... a few paternal acres bound’. Inside any inherited space, a few hectares in Calabria, a Dublin street, an English village, a youth will grow to knowledge of self, kin, country, finally enlarge to the extent of the world whose distant occupants may well seem to his patriotic mind a congeries of eccentrics who have yet to learn the full sweetness of his ...”

“... the small hours, usually ending with a round of Irish rebel songs, lead by the melodious tenor of Sean Malarkey, a shy man who had to be prevailed on to sing. One night he regaled us with an anti-colonial number that included the line ‘Out, out, ye Saxon dogs’. An Englishman called Don Griffin, who, like my father at the time, worked as a guard for ...”

“... dog of Louisiana, which looks like a spotted wolf, a dingo or, as a man who spotted him on the street once put it, ‘one of those wild dogs of Africa’. He was conversational and made a lot of noises that definitely weren’t barking, growling, or anything canine: ‘Wroarowlwolf.’ ‘Oohwar.’ ‘Rrolf.’ ‘Aaahlh!’ ‘Meol.’ ‘Wrrp.’ Going ...”

“... Times reported that in two days’ time the corvette Macha would leave Cork for Dublin, and that Sean MacBride, the Minister for External Affairs, would join the ship on its journey to Villefranche, where the casket said to contain the poet’s remains would be collected. The Macha would then return to Sligo Bay, where a state funeral was being arranged. The ...”

“... discussed at length in the media they are not mentioned at family gatherings. Conversation in the street and outside the schools is fretful, but general. In May, news of redundancies starts to filter through (six months late, at a guess), and you nod and say nothing. These are young, highly qualified people, there is no need to panic. In the shops, the sales ...”

“... office in the land, announced his resignation that morning. Not only Baroness Falkender but also Sean Hughes, the prospective Parliamentary candidate for Harold’s seat, describes the moment: he was teaching a class and was summoned from his desk by a caretaker, who commanded him to go home and change into a suit. ‘When I asked him what he was talking ...”

“... of the Home Counties were the happiest consequences of this idea, then Moorepark, the subject of Sean Damer’s study, must be one of the saddest. Moorepark is not the most infamous of Scotland’s housing estates: Paisley’s Ferguslie Park, Edinburgh’s Craigmillar and Glasgow’s Blackhill occupy in the national demonology the place which was vacated ...”

“... with self-denial, contemplation, spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ...”

“... volume of which was published in Romanian in 1996 and is translated here with prodigious skill by Sean Cotter. The trilogy is modelled on the anatomy of a butterfly: the first volume is the left wing, the second the body and the third the right wing. Cărtărescu has described the first volume as ‘visionary and idealistic’, while the other two are more ...”

“... shudders away in distaste. ‘I thought nobody could tell anybody that, and I listened to the loud street.’ This fastidiousness does not deter him from some fancy prose in his own thoughts: ‘I willed all sense down to living in her wetness like in a wound.’ This isn’t the Great Hunger, and with lashings of good food and drink around – to go no ...”

“... actors: Fanning, born in 1994, had her breakout role when she was seven in I Am Sam, opposite Sean Penn; Osment, b. 1988, is still best known for his role in The Sixth Sense alongside Bruce Willis. But Lin’s characters are not them. ‘Haley Joel Osment’ is a young writer whose life resembles Tao Lin’s; ‘Dakota Fanning’ is a high-school student ...”

“... than a numbered bus route: ‘the 88 bus passes by noisily’; ‘the 214 bus from Pratt Street to Old Street’. In Sterling Karat Gold, the Goldsmiths Prize winning novel of 2021, Isabel Waidner showed a shrewd sense of how to balance registers. In the world of the book there are small mutant creatures ...”