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“... The deck is bedded with purple blooms that wither or disappear under the purser’s footfalls. The chairs were put out at the start, and now the flying fish match the queer colours of the stripes. I am close by with a sandwich of lettuces from the huge freezers. I met an old dame in the dark with a blackthorn stick, a moon in her ear, waning or waxing she could not say, or I did not ask perhaps ...”

“... colleagues can’t let him go, there’s a three-quarters cold case they need his help with. And Sebastian Barry is a writer who in his darksome romances offers, perhaps even craves, proximity to popular films, to genre, to Westerns and war movies and noir. He does a stunning set piece, often of a violent nature (say, the all-Ireland boxing match in A ...”

“... for Sebastian Barry Possible seals disappearing far-out off Pembrokeshire, sleek commas suddenly lost in the sea’s murky prose, came back to me (memories taking a year to surface) as we returned at midnight from the Laird and Dog. It was our daily goal, two poets retreating from a Writers’ Retreat to beer’s bitter salve ...”

“... coincides with the clamorous rise of bourgeois Italy. In a series of works over the past decade, Sebastian Barry has captured the flow and recoil of modern Irish history in the blighted destinies of the Dunne family. Taken together, The Steward of Christendom, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way and now On Canaan’s Side constitute a kind of Oresteia of ...”

“... can wholly appreciate it’, which makes most readers feel that they’re too late to qualify. Sebastian Barry is a poet who has written a novel, so we must see what we can do. Owl-light is peculiar to Celtic countries, and in this novel it is shining under a disused road bridge in ‘a small sewer of a place’ in Co. Sligo, where ‘the best nights ...”

“... of the North) but a good deal more cold-eyed than anything one would expect to find in the work of Sebastian Barry. Like Jack Ferris, the drunken protagonist of A Goat’s Song, Ireland binged for a few euphoric years, then woke up with an almighty hangover. The champions of progress have accordingly been forced to confront the uglier aspects of ...”

“... book-buying public at home, but for a huge diasporic audience. Whether the w0rk of Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín, Patrick McCabe and Dermot Bolger constitutes a ‘new direction in Irish fiction’ is less certain. The major trope of Irish fiction is certainly no longer Modernist paralysis but change – Tóibín’s second novel, The ...”

“... of Anglo-Irish tensions, and to see him ultimately as a martyr for the cause, a cross between St Sebastian and Kevin Barry, which is how Stephen Rea made him appear in Terry Eagleton’s play St Oscar. Kiberd’s reading remains tentative and convincing, but he is forced to leave a great deal out, such as Wilde’s ...”

“... life at Fox Corner, but not all that much. Sylvie takes in two boys displaced from their homes, Barry and Bobby, and Ursula notices that though Sylvie treats them well they aren’t regarded as individuals. Everyone but Sylvie refers to them simply as ‘the evacuees’, ‘as if they were entirely defined by their status’. All the same, they aren’t ...”

“... Katharine Hepburn, tries to have her lobotomised to prevent her from revealing that her late son, Sebastian, was homosexual. It features a 27-year-old Taylor as Catherine Holly looking almost impossibly beautiful in a range of outfits, including a chest-hugging dark sundress and a clinging white one-piece swimming costume. Her character’s beauty is central ...”