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“... Denis Donoghue has written a seductive book. Perhaps it could be said that he has spliced together two books, one of which is more seductive than the other. One of them narrates. The other contemplates. Warrenpoint is a series of passages, not unlike journal entries, some of which deal with his youth in the Northern Irish seaside town of that name, and in particular with his awareness, and acceptance, of his father, while the others consist of the annotations of the professor and man of letters ...”

“... Denis Donoghue begins, a little self-indulgently, by reprinting six short BBC talks on ‘Words’. The excuse is that such radio talks offer a simple if incomplete model for Donoghue’s conception of literary discourse: as an address to an invisible audience, or dialogue for ever aborted by the absence of a second party ...”

“... With the catcalls from the terraces grown so strident, how much longer can Chairman Tom cling on? Denis Donoghue was an admirer of Eliot’s before Paulin was born, and brings the fruit of many decades’ reading and rumination to Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot. Donoghue begins by invoking his own 1990 ...”

“... indeed. Not invariably, it’s true: a level-headed approach is exemplified in the Irish essays of Denis Donoghue, in which sharpness of intelligence, a measure of asperity and an unfaltering lucidity can be found. McCormack’s book (more a pamphlet really) arose out of a series of weekly exchanges with his publisher, and is in a sense an adjunct to his ...”

“... doing something new, he was doing something badly. ‘In the matter of historical fact,’ Denis Donoghue writes, joining in, as it were, ‘Pater also took liberties, so many that it is a pity he did not derive more satisfaction from them.’ But Pater was satisfied not by getting it wrong, but by not having to get it right. It was his style to ...”

“... transferre, to translate, transfer – or, in the unfortunate press release that accompanied Denis Donoghue’s civilised and informative book, ‘in classical Greek metaphor means “a carrying or bearing of a cross”.’ Oops. This mistake isn’t Donoghue’s fault, of course, but it is rather a good ...”

“... College Dublin was £100. Someone from home told me that he wandered into Theatre L one morning as Denis Donoghue was lecturing and noticed me staring at Donoghue with my mouth wide open, as though I was hearing an amazing piece of gossip for the first time. Donoghue was lecturing ...”

“... childhood experience where on a visit to Warren-point, the Northern seaside resort that gave Denis Donoghue his bigotry, a ‘shiny’ Protestant girl asked, ‘Are you a Roman?’ and Devlin denied her faith. Denied it because she felt ashamed and wanted to be accepted. Thirty years later, Devlin and her sister Eiram realise that it was a crucially ...”

“... to assimilate. Paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence, is clotted with detail. I heard Denis Donoghue remark on the radio that to enjoy Letters one must ‘swing with the language’. There is something in what he says: it wouldn’t be difficult in demonstrate that the novel contains passages of marvellous prose in a variety of moods and ...”

“... is full of chatterboxes. The prose chatters too, and there is a problem here that we must look at. Denis Donoghue, in a fine essay in the New York Review of Books, defends what he calls McCarthy’s high style on the grounds that it rightly and sensitively uses rare words, and that the style has work to do. It has to ‘speak up for values the character ...”

“... are here extraordinary in nothing but the articulate energy with which Swift felt and voiced them. Denis Donoghue has complained that Ehrenpreis, in presenting Swift as more ordinary, has made him less interesting and less intelligent. But since complementarily the power and powers of Swift are sensed on every page, there is something at once moving and ...”

“... such an ordinary, affirmative, innocuous sort of affair that one wonders why Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue do not instantly rush to embrace it. At other times, and for other audiences, it becomes a far more menacing, subversive matter: nothing less than a radicalised form of Marxism, a claim which must come as a mighty surprise to most ...”

“... Yeats’s Introduction to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his ...”

“... complexity’. Ricks’s study is honourable because it seeks to redress those critics like Denis Donoghue, whose indifference to Eliot’s anti-semitism makes them complicit in it, and it also forcibly rebukes the poet for his prejudices at a number of points in the argument. It is no part of Julius’s intention to dismiss Eliot and ...”

“... are no bullfights in Hemingway, there is no violence in Faulkner,’ as Kenneth Burke once told Denis Donoghue: it’s all text; and against such a claim there can be no appeal. (The idealist can always sweetly point out to Dr Johnson, nursing his foot, that he never disputed that the idea of a stone involved the ideas of solidity and ...”