“... It is the setting for Synge’s great drama The Playboy of the Western World, and has come to be associated with all that the Celtic Tiger was busy putting behind it: priestcraft, mythology, the Celtic Revival, folk wisdom, romantic nationalism, dancing at the crossroads, an English language replete with the rhythms of Irish. Synge, as it happens, was ...”

“... me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother ...”

“... begins with Gulban Heron, rural overlord of a hotel, a shop and four sons. There is dark-haired Jack, capable, ruthless, dissolute, his father’s favourite, and there are three carrot-polled losers, the red men of the title: Cookie, a jaded man of letters, typically apt to give life a literary form and content; cynical Joey, with his fire-scarred face, who ...”

“... craft and expertise to overthrow the stiflement and self-importance of craft and expertise – to be as uninhibited and fresh and airy as a beginner. Not continue to paint yourself into a corner with aching brush and paint gone hard, but take a line for a walk, as Tom Paulin says, taking a leaf from Paul Klee, whose daily wit, invention and application (not ...”

“... book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d packed a copy of my discussion of Yeats’s ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, which I used to introduce a review in the LRB of Helen Vendler’s seminal study of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I get up at six the next morning, and rewrite it from memory, trying to draw out the ...”

“... of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the ...”

“... in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá. Being colonised by the British has its advantages. Postcolonialism is also much in fashion in universities, and most of Ireland ticks that box too. The war which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called ...”

“... Ireland today is the place you are most likely to be happy. Your desire for a robust and rising standard of living, political freedom, strong bonds with your extended family, a marriage that survives, even a decent climate – all these wishes are most likely to be granted in the Irish Republic ...”

“... robust reply: I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I have no feeling one way or the other about such bidder’s country of origin. It seems to me no more incongruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a ...”

“... What became of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners ...”

“... runs through his work: ‘No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun. (So perhaps he thinks, but it is only his greatest pretend.)’ One reason for his reluctance to identify with adults was that he could hardly look them in the eye. He never grew much beyond five feet, and it is painful to note ...”

“... grandeur: he had been married to Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter, and had been a friend of Yeats. I found myself sitting beside him in the student bar and it was astonishing and fascinating to hear someone talk with familiarity and slight contempt about Maud Gonne, and then withdraw into himself, become silent and vague and uncomfortable, refusing to ...”

“... work. Over the years they took on other passengers, of which I was one. I suppose it could be said that we each had an interest in the grounds of literature and in the ground itself. Since I first got to know these men, the landscape of these islands has been transformed. A few years ago I reported from the farms then witnessing a holocaust in their ...”

“... couldn’t do much about the printer’s errors in time for the birthday, but he hoped they would be corrected ‘in future editions’. Joyce wrote Ulysses by hand, and his arrangements for having the manuscripts typed were so loose that errors were inevitable. Some of the typists thought the writing would ...”

“... He left three accounts of their meeting in Algiers; some of what he said was later hotly denied by Douglas. The first account, written the following day, was to his mother. He explained to her that he had, after much consideration, decided to return to the hotel and miss his train, as he did not want Wilde to think he was avoiding him. ‘This terrible ...”