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“... a little too short makes close ones blurred. Short and long sight are the first disabilities which Patrick Trevor-Roper discusses in The World through Blunted Sight, his newly-revised exploration of the effect of eye-defects on personality, art and literature. He endorses T. Rice’s epitomes of short and long-sighted personalities which, made some sixty years ...”

“... milieu which nourished this remarkable writer. For instance, Bold mentions that MacDiarmid knew Patrick Geddes, the Edinburgh polymath and pioneer of modern town planning. But no attention is paid to MacDiarmid’s own suggestion that Geddes’s literary magazine the Evergreen inspired the Scottish Chapbook. In the 1890s Geddes had espoused a Scots ...”

“... a shop in Dublin and counted the volumes in the Irish Fiction section. Books by and about James Joyce took up 20 per cent of the shelf space and the weighty representation of Beckett, Wilde, Bram Stoker and Swift also skewed the figures towards a male past, but if you discount secondary or critical texts the numbers aren’t as bad as they might be: 290 ...”

“... What would an English translator need at her elbow? Shakespeare, Sterne, Lewis Carroll again and Joyce, at least. She would have to be able to handle as many registers as her author. It says nothing for the respect of the Anglophone world for the literature of other countries when a novel as important as this is so poorly served by what may be its only ...”

“... Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to ...”

“... approach is his reading of ‘The Dead’ from Dubliners, which dominates not just the entry for Joyce but for several other writers, too. When Gabriel Conroy arrives at the Morkans’ party, their West of Ireland maid pronounces his name in three syllables, reminding us of its Irish original ‘Conaire’. For Muldoon, this is only one of many signs of the ...”

“... One way to think about Antrim is as a stoic comedian, the term Hugh Kenner applied to Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (as well as Buster Keaton). ‘The stoic,’ Kenner wrote, ‘is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed.’ Such an artist ...”

“... tracts excoriated by Yeats. O’Malley tells his story in cadences influenced by the early Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and American writer friends like Hart Crane, but with a dry assurance all his own. The heroics come through all the more powerfully in his highly-polished but economical style. The supreme example can be found in the closing paragraph of the ...”

“... when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his residence there, which had lasted less than a fortnight. Brooke’s parents – whom he ...”

“... its two chief characters, who mainly share the narration, are continuations of the late-Fifties Patrick and Jenny from Take a girl like you, thus giving the story its own recessive and wistful casting-back posture. In addition, though a light and easy and genuinely funny book, Difficulties with girls has a good deal of commerce with violence, darkness and ...”

“... summer visitors. Published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in Paris (alongside work by Joyce, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin), The Dead Bury the Dead features a lustful and predatory young grave-digger, who races around in a borrowed car, forcing himself on his shop-girl fiancée, overriding the more sophisticated embraces of the wife of an absent ...”

“... writing’ – Updike, for example. He hated anything that sounded mannered or experimental, so Joyce, Beckett and others were beneath consideration. He asked me which writers I was reading. I told him Nathanael West, Emily Dickinson, Camus. He said he didn’t think much of any of them. He advocated the work of Thomas ...”

“... visual and verbal punning puts me in mind of Frank O’Connor’s account of a picture he saw in Joyce’s Paris flat: the city of Cork in a cork frame. An instance, no doubt, of Joyce’s compulsive punning, the picture can also be viewed as the manifestation of an ambiguous attitude. The visual pun depreciates the city ...”

“... of a spiritual dialogue. Substance is really signification, a notion that crops up as late as Joyce’s sense of objects as signatures of the invisible. The idea is really eucharistic, though Berkeley would probably not have thought so: in the eucharist, the bread and wine cease to be material entities and become a medium of pure presence. Much of this is ...”

“... declined. The case against the Gregory circle was most emphatically stated by the youthful James Joyce, who, as Tóibín puts it, would have pointed out that ‘there was a whole world under Lady Gregory’s nose – of clerks and servants and lower middle-class Catholics and Dublin loungers and layabouts – which she never noticed.’ Gregory had a busy ...”