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“... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...”

“... The​ Turkish language has a tense for gossip. Officially known as the reported past, it’s also the ‘hearsay’ tense, in which it’s possible to say things without its really being you who says them, or even exactly you who knows them. In Turkish, statements such as ‘they were lovers’ or ‘she had the child adopted’ have a ghostly ‘apparently’ or ‘I heard that’ hovering around them, muddying the distinction between the active speech of a subject and the speech of the community ...”

“... Ireland today is the place you are most likely to be happy. Your desire for a robust and rising standard of living, political freedom, strong bonds with your extended family, a marriage that survives, even a decent climate – all these wishes are most likely to be granted in the Irish Republic. At least this was the case in 2005, when Ireland came top – the UK was 29th – in an Economist survey of ‘quality of life’ in more than a hundred countries ...”

“... Mothers​ have a hard time in Ali Smith’s novels. I mean that Smith gives them a hard time, as well as acknowledging the hard time they’ve had already, just getting this far, in one piece. In Summer, the final novel of Smith’s seasons quartet, the harried mother is Grace. Grace gets good marks from the novel’s thirtysomethings for her resolve to live on easy terms with her ex-husband (‘next door dad’), who lives – next door – with his much younger girlfriend ...”

“... Claire-Louise​ Bennett is unpacking her library. Yes, she is. The books are not yet on the shelves. In fact, she doesn’t really have any shelves (she prefers to let the books pile up around her, a habit that gets her into trouble with at least one boorish lover). She has moved so often over the years that half her books are lost, having been packed into boxes and left in unremembered attics ...”

“... In March​ 1957 Brian O’Nolan – better known under his pen names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen – then aged 45, applied for a series of jobs at the radio broadcasting studios in Cork, including station supervisor, programme assistant, and balance and control officer. The same month he announced his candidacy for the Irish Senate. His principal argument in his own favour was that he was truly independent of the two main parties, which were still floundering about in the ‘detritus’ of the civil war ...”

“... The games​ start on the first page. Either/Or, the sequel to Elif Batuman’s campus novel, The Idiot (2017), begins where the first book left off, with Selin, now aged nineteen, arriving at Harvard for her second year at university. It’s September 1996. We last saw her in August, on holiday in Turkey with her mother, aunts and cousins. She was having a bad time, ‘living pointless, shapeless days ...”

“... Who began​ the killing? At root, arguments about the genesis of the Troubles are arguments about responsibility for murder, and that’s one reason it has proved so hard to disentangle history from blame in accounts of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the killing in the North ...”

“... sacrifice its own children – of whatever age – for what it considered to be survival.Listen to Clair Wills discuss this and her more recent piece on Netherne Asylum on the LRB ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”

“... Shirley Hazzard​ liked to tell the story of how she got to know Graham Greene. A rainy morning in the late 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will hold your hand but as long as all may –And then, according to Hazzard, Greenecould not remember the very end ...”

“... the inside and the outside of the institution, you could still be buried alive there.Listen to Clair Wills discuss this piece with Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”

“... Every hour I make scissor movements, bi­cycles, or stick my feet against the wall. To quicken it. When I do, a strange heat spreads like a flower somewhere at the base of my stomach. Purplish blue, rotten. Not painful, just before pain, an unfurling on all sides that hits against my hips and dies at the top of my thighs. Almost pleasure.Denise Lesur​ is in her student room, trying to bring on her abortion ...”

“... the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West made his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Clair Wills doesn’t write about it until almost the end of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain – as if delaying the moment as long as possible – and then only quotes a few fragments. But it’s striking how current some of ...”

“... is probably second only to Heaney among contemporary Irish poets as scholarly canon-fodder, Clair Wills’s Reading Paul Muldoon is only the second full-length study to be devoted to his work. Wills covers much the same ground as Tim Kendall’s 1996 study Paul Muldoon, though in less detail (she passes over the ...”