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“... Fool was, he wrote, ‘a marvellous book – so much better than my own Power and the Glory’. To Flann O’Brien: ‘At-Swim-Two-Birds has remained to my mind ever since it first appeared one of the best books of our century.’ To Roald Dahl: ‘I have just finished reading Boy with immense pleasure and great horror.’ To Brian Moore: ‘I always ...”

“... authors (harps are pictured) but none of them except Synge is very Irish. I looked for Yeats and Flann O’Brien but didn’t find them. That they didn’t write prefaces is scarcely an excuse. Anyway, Synge is almost enough, as he concludes his preface to The Playboy of the Western World with these fine lines: In Ireland, for a few years more, we have ...”

“... of contributors: Elizabeth Bowen, John Hewitt, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Hubert Butler, Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and others. ‘Cannot we all meet, throwing in what we have?’ Bowen wrote in her essay ‘The Big House’, published in the Bell’s first issue. The magazine accordingly stood for pluralism and intellectual openness in ...”

“... intensities and strange forms which 20th-century Irish novels display from Joyce to Beckett to Flann O’Brien and John Banville. When the lack of freedom is viewed, on the other hand, as a structural defect, based on economic forces, then the novel tends to be much more dependent for its appeal upon the verisimilitude with which the social formation ...”

“... social, somehow, to describe the kind of deafness I want to identify (though it is true that Edna O’Brien, as beautiful and sexy on the page as in life, really was chased out of town). It’s hard to remember what it was like back in 2013, but I seem to recall that you couldn’t complain then without being told that other people had it worse. What women ...”

“... mean nothing at all, or those who found or find them worthy merely of jokes and asides, such as Flann O’Brien or Paul Muldoon. Inventing Ireland, in the sense that Yeats invented Ireland, has stopped; writers now invent other sorts of Ireland, and it is not necessary to read their work politically. Is Beckett, then, the one who got away? Kiberd has ...”

“... Shandy and Leopold Bloom. And then you start fantasising about getting them all together, like Flann O’Brien does with all his big favourites in the Dalkey cave. You wonder whether the period conventions would allow for it. Is being a nice guy enough of a transhistorical quality to let the party go with a swing?To which the answer seems to be: yes ...”

“... Fucking explosives and arms are non-fiction. They’re reality, man.’ The McCann episode is a Flann O’Brien novel reworked by Tom Sharpe. The posthumous dream brought back as crude farce. ‘Lennon’s dead,’ McCann threatens, when the former Beatle declines to appear at a concert in Derry. The Irishman flaunts his professed IRA contacts and gets ...”

“... to Dublin and New York, and the emergence of a globalised fiction in which America is a base.‘Flann O’Brien was right,’ Deane says at the start of ‘Emergency Aesthetics’. ‘Joyce was invented by Americans. He was part of their foreign policy, of the drive to make the USA a cultural presence and to recruit “high” culture to its mission of ...”

“... isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to create a male character who was neither comic nor ...”

“... negative theology of the great medieval schoolman John Scottus Eriugena to the vision of hell of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. It is true that nothing, like something, happens anywhere, but it tends to happen more in a down-at-heel colony (‘an afterthought of Europe’, Joyce scornfully called it) than it does on Wall Street or in ...”