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“... it seems, is a subscriber to the theory outlined if not first, then at least most cogently, by Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds: ‘Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as ...”

“... or want to sign it. He thought he had more time. Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under the name Flann O’Brien, also went to work in the civil service after the death of his father, who had also worked in Customs and Excise, and who left twelve children behind. According to his biographer, Anthony Cronin, Customs and Excise did not offer a ...”

“... surely in us.’ The faithful Bann is the most conscientious of editors, though a reference to ‘Flann O’Connor’ conjures a nightmare hybrid of Flann O’Brien and Flannery O’Connor. Almost fifty years on he can confirm doubtful dates in Finlay’s letter by cross-checking them with the date-stamp on the ...”

“... past.’ No wonder that two veteran Joyceans, John Wyse Jackson of the Chelsea Press, editor of Flann O’Brien and Oscar Wilde, and the Dublin social historian Peter Costello, should have been inspired to produce a full-length biography of, so to speak, Our Founder. It is in its way a unique undertaking. Hard to think of any other father in the ...”

“... in the Bell, a periodical edited by Sean O’Faolain, and in the pages of the Irish Times. Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices was banned in 1941, on the basis of the single sentence: ‘She saw Etienne and her father in the embrace of love.’ She was the only Irish writer to appeal the board’s decision – a fact that showed either collective ...”

“... to remove himself from the world, and that this Sydney sound is something very special. Not since Flann O’Brien has so much been made of Phouka the Fairy. We are meant to half-believe in Phouka, and, for that matter, in Hecate and Hades. But only half-believe – so that there is something in the book both for the sceptical and for the superstitious ...”

“... all Irish writing in English. Kuno Meyer, Robin Flower, James Carney, Brian O’Nolan (alias Flann O’Brien), Gerard Murphy, Valentin Iremonger, Austin Clarke, Sean O’Tuama, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague and a host of others have created a kind of interstitial literature which responds to the genius of both tongues and effects thereby a form of ...”

“... Cronin in his reissued Dead as Doornails. This is a memoir of Dublin’s Kavanagh, Behan and Flann O’Brien, and of London’s Colquhoun, MacBryde and Maclaren-Ross. Six kenspeckle characters – ‘and a rum lot too, as the devil said when he read the Ten Commandments’. The book is full of extraordinary anecdotes, but there’s more to it than ...”

“... and the immense achievement of Yeats, and activated their own literary impulses accordingly. Flann O’Brien comes to mind, along with the Bell’s editorial staff and contributors: the O’Faolain dissentients. In 1951, Dillon Johnston reminds us, came the Dolmen Press, under whose imprint first collections by Thomas Kinsella, Richard Murphy and ...”

“... with the pen’ – and Englishing his stories is as much of a challenge as making an Italian of Flann O’Brien. In such a case, half a translation is no better than none at all: Calvino points out that Landolfi’s ‘individual and unpredictable work is only possible because he has at his disposal a language which has rules with established uses, a ...”

“... war which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a famine in which British bungling and indifference played a considerable part, a sizeable segment of the Irish population ...”

“... century, really been merely a catalogue of horrors? Is this the country that produced Ulysses and Flann O’Brien, exports culture rather than armaments and evolved in a handful of decades from a benightedly parochial nation to a liberal, multicultural one? You might well find little positive in the place if, like Barry, you consistently adopt the ...”

“... to the unsayable. Mock pedantry is a familiar Irish genre, from Swift and Sterne to Joyce and Flann O’Brien. Language must lend shape to truth without betraying its essential indeterminacy. In the Beckettian phrase, it must keep trying to fail better. Beckett once remarked that his favourite word was ‘perhaps’; and it is not too fanciful to ...”

“... Einstein and Proust, the comic anarchy of the Avignon novels is post-Joyce, post-Pynchon and post-Flann O’Brien. In terms of subject-matter, Durrell has a shrewd eye for the sensational. Readers of the ‘Avignon Quintet’ can steep themselves in the secrets of the Templars, gypsy folklore, Nazi atrocities, the mysteries of the sperm, sexual yoga, and ...”

“... like them, too, it tries to pre-empt ingenious critical comparisons to Dostoevsky, Kafka, Nabokov, Flann O’Brien, Joyce, Cummings and others by supplying a systematic schedule of allusions and literary credentials (in Lanark this took the form of an Index of Plagiarisms). This novel also experiments with alternatives to the serial ordering of prose on ...”