“... the Irish are the Indians to the far west, circling the wagons of imperial civilisation,’ Fintan O’Toole writes in The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities. ‘Once in America, of course, the Irish cease to be the Indians and become the cowboys.’ What Thomson misses when he looks at Ford is the elegiac element in his westerns, the way his static ...”

“... common? Is it enough to reply, ‘Well, Eton of course,’ and be done with it? In Heroic Failure, Fintan O’Toole diagnoses in the Brexit worldview a combination of Thatcherite lust for economic deregulation and postwar nostalgia for lost imperial might. To summarise this worldview: we were ‘great’ when we had an empire. We won the Second World War ...”

“... in the field. Which makes you wonder why, on the Easter weekend, the Times literary editor, Fintan O’Toole, ran a full page about women of the Rising that was written by three men. Ken Keating who compiled the figures on the Irish Times noted that the proportion of women reviewed dipped towards the end of the year. Perhaps this is a reflection of ...”

“... believes that English identity is characterised not by imperial nostalgia, as such commentators as Fintan O’Toole and Anthony Barnett have suggested, but by a more inchoate sense of communal ‘loss’. Loss of what? ‘One part of the Englishman’s burden of the three Celtic statelets was to eschew a patriotism that was other than British, or a flag ...”

“... damage it irrevocably. Sadie Until we get the official biography, which is being written by Fintan O’Toole, we have little chance of making sense of Heaney’s occasional naughtiness. But the letters give us an inside view of a career that most of us assumed soared effortlessly. The grounded Wicklow poetry of Field Work (1979) and the ...”

“... needed was a discriminatory blockbuster from supposed progressives. One of the best things in Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is his conjuring up of the 1980s, when the Troubles seemed endless in the North and patriarchal Catholicism gave a final lash of its tail. Now that the feminist campaigns of this period are receding into ...”

“... with the contemporary world, with the spiritual and emotional famine of their own times, as Fintan O’Toole has pointed out, even though Murphy’s play is set in the Famine years. For Joyce and for many other writers, the Famine was too distant, and the world that grew out of it too interesting and close and dramatic. As Seamus Deane writes in ...”