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“... slippage between what is said and what is seen – be transposed into a novel? That’s the aim of Colm Tóibín’s rewriting of the Oresteia in House of Names. It’s a bit like one of those high dives with an enormous degree of difficulty – a quadruple backflip with twist – where the possibility of making the wrong kind of splash is very great. Tóibín ...”

“... Colm Tóibín’s frustrating new novel starts from a pleasingly skewed perspective: its narrator Richard Garay (less often, Ricardo) was brought up in Buenos Aires, child of an Argentinian businessman and an English woman who never adjusted to her new surroundings and clung in imagination to a country she had left in the early Twenties ...”

“... by Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Susan Sontag, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Bernard and Colm Tóibín (Barnes has also made a loan to the exhibition). Some are affectionately biographical. Comparisons between Hodgkin’s art of memory and Proust’s are made.* The pleasure the pictures give – which is considerable – has a strong relation to ...”

“... I came across these phrases because I was reading some of James’s letters in parallel with Colm Tóibín’s remarkable new novel, which situates James’s tender and timid yearnings in love in a whole life of losses and evasions, but I already had lying around in my mind an argument Tóibín advanced in these pages, in 1999, about homosexuality and ...”

“... writer’s style, and Silvers was always trying to work out if something was worth getting into. Colm Tóibín remembers going to a show by Anthony Gormley in London. ‘The show included a large steam-filled glass room where you lost your bearings immediately and went around as though in fog,’ Tóibín recalls. ‘It was my idea of fun. So I went in and ...”

“... to the game. Somewhere behind the coverage, though, there was a sense of something not being said. Colm Bradley, a GAA footballer and journalist, hinted at it: ‘I have played senior club football in Fermanagh for over a decade and I have been aware that Darren Graham has been on the receiving end of sectarian abuse and I would have guessed that plenty of ...”

“... and smells, diurnal rituals and rhythms of his uncle’s house. ‘The rhythms of the book,’ Colm Tóibín wrote in an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, ‘follow the faded happiness of things, the strange, remembered moments, but render them as urgent, present, almost pure.’ Its success lies in this atmosphere rather than in the book’s ...”

“... to people who are as stupid and narrow-minded as that.’ In the introduction to this reissue, Colm Tóibín remembers seeing Broderick in the bar of Buswells Hotel in Dublin: ‘He was wearing a beautifully cut three-piece suit with elaborate stripes. He was alone and he looked desolate.’ He remained a Catholic throughout his life and even considered a ...”

“... Prize and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. On the dust-jacket of the British edition, Colm Tóibín calls it ‘a tour de force … a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Tóibín is also the novel’s UK publisher, under the Tuskar Rock imprint, which may have ...”

“... or over the border. Their locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration.The novelist Colm Toibin said in his Sunday Independent review of the Field Day Anthology: ‘Unreconstructed Irish nationalists have always had real difficulty with the 26 Counties. The 26 Counties are limbo, they believe, waiting for the day when our island will be ...”

“... fortifications have long gone, and there’s a world of difference between the frightening place Colm Tóibín explored in 1987 in Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border, the still fractious place I wrote about in my 2000 book, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, and the place Garrett Carr describes in his just published The Rule of the ...”