“... alphabet. The generous range of Mercier’s pieces, from 18th-century Gaelic antiquarianism to ‘Samuel Beckett and the Bible’, thus comes as a timely reminder of the limits of fashion. As Declan Kiberd remarks in an affectionate Introduction, Mercier was one of the last of the gentleman scholars, and one does not turn to his work for path-breaking ...”

“... was a period of extraordinary activity during which the museum hosted off-Broadway productions of Beckett and Albee, a two-week course in painting from Elaine de Kooning, Lightnin’ Hopkins in concert and a festival of poetry featuring Kenneth Koch, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Bly. Most fun of all, Barthelme organised an exhibition, New American Artefacts: The ...”

“... further unhappiness. We hope for small mercies for McGahern’s characters. He is something of a Samuel Beckett writing in relative longhand, less emblematically and, I would say, more humanly. One of his ostensibly more enterprising characters, who has escaped to work in the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, comes home on leave with habitual ...”

“... come out with to indicate that what he is writing or what he is praising seems to him good.’ And Beckett is absurdly teased, by being paired with Wodehouse: There is also a certain resemblance between Wodehouse and a modern master like Samuel Beckett. Both are, verbally speaking, performing fleas, but with ...”

“... The repetitive syntax suggests that Guggenheim may have learnt something from her affair with Samuel Beckett. The second sentence is genuinely banal, and its comic contrast with the uninhibited selfishness of the first was probably not intended. The remainder is not untouched by Surrealism and we are left to wonder about the candlesticks – no doubt ...”

“... between Thompson and Faulkner(both used multiple-viewpoints in their novels), Thompson and Samuel Beckett (both described ‘claustrophobic’ landscapes), Thompson and Nabokov (both wrote about perverts) and even Thompson and Hemingway (both presented male protagonists who lost their penises in the war). It is impossible not to be intrigued by ...”

“... end of civilisation persisted until the Eighties in the work of James Joyce’s former amanuensis, Samuel Beckett. It is implicit indeed in the title of his play, Endgame. The work – today unfashionable – which seemed to authenticate this vision was Spengler’s Decline of the West. Our generation of writers was, very emphatically and very ...”

“... Why is cricket so appealing to playwrights – English and Irish ones anyway? Samuel Beckett represented his university against Northants. Harold Pinter, who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too ...”

“... Feeney, an ancient Irish ex-priest who boasts of his likeness to ‘the expatriate atheist writer Samuel Beckett’. With his equally decrepit friend Ulrich, Feeney devotes his remaining days to rampaging around the lakeside sermonising on behalf of the animals, even inducing Egan to recite ‘poetry – was it?’ containing such lines as ‘The snake ...”

“... think this method is entertaining but perhaps not generally to be recommended, even if it is what Samuel Beckett does on a well-known occasion where he translates himself from the French. A character in Molloy reports that his employer said life is a beautiful thing, ‘une bien belle chose’; in English he opts for ‘a thing of beauty and a joy for ...”

“... he had envisaged would have revered the writings of uncompromising Modernists like his friend Samuel Beckett, or the avant-garde painters and sculptors whose work O’Malley collected and wrote about. In the Thirties and Forties, ‘Eire’ was unlikely to do this, and it is significant that some of O’Malley’s most substantial writing in his ...”

“... Habit, Samuel Beckett says in his essay on Proust, substitutes the ‘boredom of living’ for the ‘suffering of being’, and he has a point. Human existence is an acquired taste, and many of us get through it with the aid of what Vladimir in Waiting for Godot calls the ‘great deadener’. Blank simian rote – the round of feeding, grooming, ablution, slack-jawed vacancy – serves to block out tracts of time that might otherwise get colonised by anxious thought ...”

“... of a different tack now. Writers shouldn’t be criticised for their subject-matter, should they? Samuel Beckett is about as dark as a writer could possibly be. His work is very claustrophobic to me. And I have a book in my coat pocket – a book of poems by Philip Larkin, and my God, Larkin is dark – isn’t he? But he writes with such wonderful ...”

“... share, including Berkeley, Swift, Rowan Hamilton, Lecky, Dowden, Bury, Douglas Hyde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett. Since 1952, and beginning with McConnell, Trinity has gradually acknowledged its responsibility not only to the past but to Irish taxpayers. It has opened its gate for more students. For many years the student population numbered a happy 2500 ...”

“... handout bizarrely suggests, comparable to that of Edna O’Brien, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Samuel Beckett (though I wish just for the sake of the gaiety of the nation that someone’s work was comparable with all those writers). The writing strains towards being very good, but is sabotaged by fear. Blackwood’s friends are agreed that she saw ...”