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“... Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower), Dostoevsky (Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name ...”

“... fold of silence like a star accused by the dawn light,’ which is entrancingly meaningless. If Colm Tóibín is too costive with words, Barry is too spendthrift. In contemporary Irish fiction, John Banville strikes just the right balance between opulence and discipline. Even so, Barry’s verbal extravagance makes for an intriguing, typically Irish tension ...”

“... Stephen King suggests in his blurb on the back cover, and provides ‘documentary evidence’, Colm Tóibín says, ‘of rural America in a time of crisis’ – a kind of new, new journalism then. Developing her interest in merging factual circumstance with the invented (Lark and Termite used a series of photographs as well as historical information from ...”

“... 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 Heather Blazing, is a ...”

“... fight on her hands to be who she was, surviving the double-takers. One night, I introduced her to Colm Tóibín, and she did her ‘bottle through the table’ trick, which he put straight into the novel he was writing (The Story of the Night). At the Groucho Club, there would be too much Sancerre with various Britpop loons, a bit of napping under the snooker ...”

“... failures. (The first of these was conceived in rooms that Woolson had once rented in Oxford.) If Colm Tóibín is right to suggest, in his novel The Master (2004), that there is something of her unrequited devotion in The Ambassadors’ Maria Gostrey as well, then James reversed their tutelary relation and made Woolson his guide to Europe. The macabre story ...”

“... powers of attraction (in his fictionalised version of Blunt’s affair with Lady Gregory, Colm Tóibín has her think of him as like a ‘goose stuffed at Christmas’). At this distance he appears a faintly disturbing but almost ludicrous figure, a sexual predator who was also a sentimentalist. In 1891, Margot, aged 28, still unmarried and impatient ...”

“... she inspires, while rejecting the meaning of the symbols and the doctrines associated with them. Colm Tóibín, in The Testament of Mary,* captures this state of doubled consciousness, and with a tragedian’s insight into her inner conflict has entered into her voice, expressing the anguished struggle between love and doubt, faith and rage, trust and ...”

“... quoted above. It doesn’t matter whether we want to murder our mothers because we do it anyway. Colm Tóibín wryly suggests J.M. Synge tried bohemianism as ‘a new way of killing his [doggedly Protestant] mother’, but Proust’s idea is that we don’t have to try at all. We can’t really acknowledge this fact, he suggests, because we would probably ...”

“... A brogue isn’t a foreign accent, not exactly: it can be a way of speaking your own tongue. Colm Tóibín recently recalled that when his grandfather was arrested for his part in the Easter Rising, he was sent to prison in Wales, and found to his surprise – his dismay? – that the guards were all Welsh speakers, while the Irish prisoners all spoke ...”

“... the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In his review of Truman Capote’s letters in the LRB Colm Tóibín lists Capote’s many dislikes, including Beyond the Fringe, which he thought ‘rather dreary’. I never could think of much to say to Kenneth Tynan or he to me but whenever we met in the early 1960s he’d make a point of telling me that of all ...”

“... even as a Christian – and the libertines of literature have a habit of being allowed everything. Colm Tóibín, in a 2009 interview with Bookslut, expressed a belief that Updike’s homophobia would eventually eat into his critical reputation. (‘Squinting, Harry takes the offered hand in a brief shake and tries not to think of those little HIVs, intricate ...”