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“... Conor CruiseO’Brien has enjoyed a career of variety and distinction: diplomat, politician, man of letters, an expert on Africa, Irish history and French literature. International affairs have interested him since his UN days in the late Fifties, when his ideas were close to Sartre’s ...”

“... Daizy [sic], give me your anser [sic] do’. Such Afrikaner wooing of English-speakers, reflects O’Brien, has fortuitously coincided with the need to rephrase apartheid. Once it was Bantu Administration. Then it was separate development. Then it was community development, then co-operation and development. Perhaps, muses ...”

“... of civilisation.’ Two of the three authors who preface the reprints endorse this lofty estimate. Conor CruiseO’Brien, in his Foreword to The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, which Malraux wrote during World War Two, declares: ‘The author was probably imagining, in historical retrospect, a happier future time, after the ...”

“... about the backslidings. Hypocrisy waits at every intersection. But it remains the fact that Conor CruiseO’Brien has been one of the great stylists of our time, whether writing about France, Britain, Ireland or Africa. It further remains a fact that his has been a voice attuned to the discourse of reason, and ...”

“... on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor CruiseO’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to divert attention away from the ...”

“... interpretation of history, whose unlikely, and apparently unconscious, present-day continuator is Conor CruiseO’Brien. In The Long Affair O’Brien presents himself as an original and incorruptible outsider prepared not only to challenge the vested interests of Jeffersonian ...”

“... I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice.’ Even so judicious a critic as Conor CruiseO’Brien, writing 13 years later, saw fit to comment: ‘The defence of his mother required support for the French army’s pacification of Algeria.’ It was not so simple. In pre-war Algeria, Camus had long ...”

“... A Colder Eye, a study of the modern Irish writers from Yeats, Joyce and Synge to Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Kenner encourages his reader, an American apparently, to believe that Ireland is a crazy country from which, believe it or don’t, a number of extraordinary writers have emerged. Their emergence testifies to the fact, I gather, that nations sometimes ...”

“... intellectuals in the Eighties. He was definitively despatched by Gore Vidal some long while ago. Conor CruiseO’Brien then took his furious turn at the coconut shy. And here is Hitchens, lobbing adjectives like grenades in the same cause. It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and ...”

“... until, that is, it is put into practice by Paulin: and then, to judge by his analysis of Conor CruiseO’Brien in Ireland and the English Crisis, it can become a formidable engine. The main thesis is that O’Brien changed his engagement with his own community when, through ...”

“... of Kipling. Hitchens lines up the most formidable detractors (Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Conor CruiseO’Brien), quotes them fairly and at length, and then demolishes them. He even follows Orwell’s injunction that a writer should be particularly severe with the work of his friends (in this ...”

“... and Society began by showing the importance of Burke to the Left and the lessons he has to offer. Conor CruiseO’Brien has examined Burke’s relationship to revolution in several papers which offer fascinating fore-tastes of the biography he has in the making: among other points he has established significant common ...”

“... united in opposition to it (albeit for widely differing reasons) Mr Paisley, Mr Gerry Adams, Dr Conor CruiseO’Brien and Mr Charles Haughey. Another is that it has divided Fianna Fail into two very unequal sections. Whether this realignment manifests itself in an increase in the number of deaths which litter the ...”

“... History of Humanity. Yet quite a few gloomsters were not checked in, notably éminence noire Conor CruiseO’Brien. Was the Indie trying to cheer us up? Or perhaps it was offering a little consolation to those already suffering from the fin-de-siècle drowning sensation. More serious victims might also try ...”

“... do no harm’; ‘it’s none of our business’; ‘we’re broke’. Or even race. Thus Conor CruiseO’Brien in 1992: ‘There are places where a lot of men prefer war, and the looting and raping and domineering that go with it, to any sort of peacetime occupation. One such place is Afghanistan. Another is ...”