“... in a letter written in 1932 – about his difficulties over Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill lamented his lack of a great language adequate to his tragic subject: ‘By way of self-consolation, I don’t think, from the evidence of all that is being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the ...”

“... I bought from him more than ten years ago, maybe fifteen years ago, which I first saw with Robert Armstrong in late December 1980 in his studio in Gorey, Co. Wexford, rests against the wall of the room where I work. We are uneasy with each other now. The talk turns to Christmas and he mentions the sadness of Gorey and that extraordinary space he made ...”

“... only living and working but loving and giving birth in orbiting space stations. One seer, Gerard O’Neill of Princeton, imagined settlements of ten thousand people or more in each of the great, slowly-wheeling colonies, exploiting the energy of the Sun and the mineral resources of the Moon and the asteroids. He couldn’t say precisely when: ‘I consider ...”

“... under the umbrella organisation Britain in Europe, whose director was the diplomat Con O’Neill, or the rudderless National Referendum Campaign, whose tribunes came from the extreme left and extreme right. Cleverly, Britain in Europe enlisted celebrities rather than men in grey suits to get out its message. It used endorsements from the boxer ...”

“... due to the genius of Abdul Aziz (also known as ‘Ibn Saud’ – a title comparable to ‘The O’Neill’ or ‘The MacTavish’). Starting out from Kuwait in 1902 with a band of about forty followers, he regained the stronghold of Riyadh from his family’s Turkish-backed rivals, the Rashids, and proceeded, by war and diplomacy, to recover all the ...”

“... some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must understand the apparatus he or she is ‘threaded through’ in order to challenge, if not to change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to be so threaded, and many curators only too eager to do the ...”

“... intellectuals in Britain and the US. And then there is the problem of the scope, or as Onora O’Neill puts it, the ‘bounds’ of justice. ‘Social’ justice is by definition a property of institutions, not people. People can of course behave unjustly in their social roles: judges take bribes, teachers have favourite pupils, policemen fabricate ...”

“... mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (like Pound and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera ...”

“... the 1950s, edited by D.J. Enright, appeared in 1955, followed a year later by New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume ...”

“... Texas ranch, and gives nicknames to the members of his cabinet. (‘Pablo’ for the hapless Paul O’Neill; ‘Z-Man’ for Robert Zoellick.) George Washington, on the other hand, was so aloof that even his contemporaries tried to make light of the fact. According to one story, at the Constitutional Convention in ...”

“... over eight hundred pages which include a fine 48-page essay on Irish Gaelic literature by Seumas O’Neill and a briefer one (nine pages) on Irish writing in English, before getting down to giving the bibliographical and biographical facts about almost five hundred Irish writers, with critical essays attached. I’ve seen books like this before – I even ...”

“... of ideological nuance. Consider Reg Prentice (Labour to Tory), Shaun Woodward (Tory to Labour) and Robert Jackson (Tory to Labour), all of whom defected directly from one of the two main parties to the other, when a more gentle transition to the Liberal middle ground might have carried more ideological plausibility. In any case the gulfs within parties can ...”

“... nature’. There are laureates who are unequivocally deserving on straight literary criteria – O’Neill, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Singer, Bellow, Morrison. There are others – Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck and John Steinbeck – for whom non-literary factors seem to have been at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have ...”

“... be the Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its ...”

“... Sun, there was no secret made about the fact. Nonetheless Amis wrote under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’. Presumably this indicates some sort of functional schizophrenia, a way of not being Amis while writing a very un-Amis-like book, yet at the same time receiving royalties into the Amis bank account. (Fleming, of course, was the biggest earner ...”