“... Wake and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, as well as a purveyor of anti-drama in the work of Samuel Beckett. If the Irish supplied England with much of their stage comedy, from Goldsmith and Sheridan to Shaw and Wilde, it was partly because comedy turns on a conflict between the way conventions feel natural when you are inside them, and arbitrary ...”

“... Kenner, pillar of the reactionary National Review, who gives equal praise to the joking despair of Beckett and the regimented utopianism of Buckminster Fuller. The alliance, in one form or another, is of long standing. Baudelaire understood its nature more than a century ago. ‘This use of military metaphor,’ he wrote of the literary application of the word ...”

“... imagine we’ve got past it. ‘We make a leap,’ he wrote in 2008 in ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, an astonishing essay on Beckett, Melville and laboratory animals. ‘Leave it to some other occasion to reflect on what this leap consisted in.’ Or there’s the opening of Elizabeth Costello ...”

“... Jewish forms of failure – for those Malamudian men ‘who never stopped hurting’ – than was Samuel Beckett, in his longer fiction, for misery-ridden Molloy and Malone. Both writers, while bound inextricably to the common life of the clan, severed their racial memories from the larger social and historical setting, and then, focusing as narrowly as ...”

“... seems an adequate response, except perhaps the via negativa words of the male heir of Modernism, Samuel Beckett, and the myriad murmurings of Modernism’s literary daughters.’ The literary mothers of those literary daughters have generally been dismissed by or excluded from celebrations of Modernism. Recently, however, there has been a surge of ...”

“... to carry an unconscious hesitation. In Gaelic, the ‘O’ should carry no apostrophe, and even Samuel Beckett, that least Gaelic of writers, instructed his printers to this effect when listing ‘O Faolain (no apostrophe)’ among banned writers in an article on censorship. For some reason, Jack Whelan gave his new nationalised self a ...”

“... Punch thought that the author was so sure of her new self that she must belong to the school of Samuel Beckett. In Remake it’s this wise child she celebrates, and indeed she mischievously cites – from Jenny Diski writing in the London Review of Books, as it happens – a witty mock-theory about the ‘crucial years of an individual’s ...”

“... of reality, of which Durkheim, Mauss, Bachelard and Althusser are among the modern inheritors. Samuel Beckett seems to have discovered that writing in French made it easier for him to parody this obsessively taxonomising style of thought. On the other hand, there is a current of anti-rationalism which runs from the Symbolists and Georges Sorel to ...”

“... as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage to the man she ‘fondled and waited on … in Sickness & in Health’, ‘my Monitor, my Friend, my Inmate, my dear Mr Johnson’, the powers of imprisonment and inspiration were reciprocal. If Johnson was, as ...”

“... The Music of Chance Auster satisfyingly finds his own way of fulfilling a prophecy by Samuel Beckett which he quoted in one of the essays in Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979: ‘There will be a new form, and ... this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really ...”

“... to what an incompatible range of other artists he appeals. Surely the only thing in common between Samuel Beckett, Miles Davis, Martin Scorsese, Philip Larkin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Marley, would be their shared interest in his music. His songs have been more widely covered by other musicians, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix, from Olivia ...”

“... psychologically complex creatures are unlikely to be impressed by the wasted protagonists of Samuel Beckett. Indeed, the prejudice against ‘stereotypes’ and in favour of subtle, plausible, full-blooded characters is one of the most entrenched in our current literary orthodoxy, which is no doubt one reason the most favoured form of literary ...”

“... we might wish literary letters never to do: they diminish our sense of the writer who wrote them. Samuel Beckett, who loved gossip and liked a drink, left us no such sub-standard letters. Jane Austen, who used her correspondence to establish her style, would have blushed to have sent a fraction of these. In 1976, about ten minutes before receiving the ...”

“... it if he has. Writing these words brings to mind something that one of Coetzee’s mentors, Samuel Beckett, once wrote in a letter to Georges Duthuit towards the end of a long and tormented attempt to formulate the nature of his art: ‘I have this frantic urge to fix up for myself a situation that is literally impossible, what you call the ...”

“... is stuff that gets the pulse racing. The words flow. Apt phrases from T.S. Eliot; some Bob Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and many jokes; Keats-Byron-Tennyson-Dryden-Shakespeare-Beckett-Hill running giddily into each other; but each writer and observation given its space to illuminate and be illuminated into a radiant ...”