“... of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among others, and isn’t ...”

“... it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human atmosphere. And it ...”

“... In a discussion​ of literary brothers Theroux mentions not just Thomas and Heinrich Mann and James and Stanislaus Joyce but Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, ‘both of whom I’d known’. At this moment the notional Jay Justus completely disappears within Paul Theroux, who had a famous if not enduring friendship with ...”

“... to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the Provos and diagnosing in Yeats – a romantic nationalist and a probable initiate of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – ‘the ...”

“... As Moore moved from writing a short story to writing a novel he wrote to his sister in Belfast (as Joyce wrote to his sister in Dublin looking for details of the city) asking for her memories of Miss Keogh, the visitor on whom Judith Hearne was based. However, he disregarded most of what he was told. (The original Miss Keogh had a job, for example.) He used ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”

“... be just as stimulating to their holders. The first two sections of the book deal with Yeats and Joyce, respectively; the third considers the literary consequences of exigencies occurring at one time or another; and the fourth contains spirited appraisals of literary figures like George Moore and James Stephens. Poetry in ...”

“... in his sleep.’ The Rover has indeed something of that verbal satisfaction which attended Henry James’s style, and grew on it and with it to the point where idea and intention became superfluous. ‘I’m never sure what it is I’m affirming,’ Conrad said despondently at this late time to a young French writer: but ‘affirmation’, in the sense that ...”

“... slow dynamic, we conjecture fragmentarily, our unique signatures – micro-chips, bezique, Joyce, teasmades, popes, string, architecture – doomed squiggles; still we weep, and think, notice that girl, or clean the sink. On the other hand, the grander manner, butchly colloquialised, pushes under our nose not merely experience but Waterman’s ...”

“... hunt for women.’Not to be outdone by Kavanagh’s friendliness of tone and generosity of spirit, Joyce recommends:‘You lose more of yourself than you redeemdoing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent.When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swimout on your own and fill the elementwith signatures on your own frequency,echo ...”

“... leaves Trinity College Dublin and moves to England in the 1680s as private secretary – or, as Joyce put it, ‘privysuckatary’ – to the retired diplomat and belletrist Sir William Temple. Swift may even have been an illegitimate half-brother of Temple, Damrosch suggests (one might say speculates). But it’s tempting to see him more as the hapless ...”

“... political philosophy, the history of early modern philosophy, and the aesthetics of Wagner and Joyce – and wants to do justice to the texture of our moral lives. His goal is to provide a meta-ethics – an account of the nature of ethical truth – that respects the demands of both Naturalism and humanism. This isn’t an easy thing to do. Most attempts ...”

“... he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... organ and rhetorical technique for each of Ulysses’s eighteen episodes, predetermining the way Joyce would approach the narrative. You can sense Queneau’s excitement at seeing this type of organisation. Just as he mocked the Surrealists as clueless butterfly-catchers, so he despaired of the free-form novel: ‘Anyone can drive an indeterminate number of ...”