“... concerned with sojourning abroad, the dangers and the alienation. We are in the Fifties again (Colm Toibin was born in 1955), concerned not with Communist Russia but with Fascist Spain. The artistic Katherine has abandoned her husband and ten-year-old son in Ireland and escaped to Barcelona. Her widowed mother, who now lives in London, had made a similar ...”

“... a fairer comparison for the sentences from the Granta and Faber anthologies might be the work of Colm Tóibín, a contemporary of the authors represented there, and like them, a practitioner of the art of bald prose. The relation of text to representation in The Heather Blazing, Tóibín’s second novel, is ...”

“... road behind him. O’Shea’s photographs happen ‘when people are about to do something else’, Colm Tóibín writes in the afterword. ‘He composes his image before the image has composed itself.’ That seems to me a different way of thinking about Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. O’Shea catches the uncertain moment, when the thing that ...”

“... Atonement, The Remains of the Day and The English Patient do no great disservice to the books. And Colm Tóibín wasn’t unhappy with Nick Hornby’s screenplay for Brooklyn, despite two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss Kelly intimates to Eilis that she knows about her secret marriage in the ...”

“... in Brooklyn. Father Flood will sponsor her passage and find her a job. If Father Rossiter in Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, ‘hated to see people emigrating’, Father Flood is all for it. He wants to see Eilis working in an office, not wasting her youth in a corner shop. A girl like Eilis, he is sure, will get ahead in New ...”

“... the real one’ was not well calculated to placate him.So Mann is an excellent subject for Colm Tóibín, who, both in criticism and fiction, has always been interested in the processes by which, as Auden once put it, the writer ‘fetches/The images out that hurt and connect/From Life to Art’. This novel, a thoughtful and deeply acquainted ...”

“... remark – jocular, perhaps, and not the sort of sally she would have chosen to be remembered by. Colm Tóibín makes more than one allusion to it in this essay, gently hinting that his sympathies are with the toothbrushless, though there is no place for anger in his elegant little study of the great lady. Her close association with W.B. Yeats, with ...”

“... people hand you back, like an obligation, flat statements of what you “meant”?’ Colm Tóibín avoids this temptation. On Elizabeth Bishop is an engaging introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her work in his life. May Swenson told Bishop that, when reading some of her poems, ‘I have to furnish them ...”

“... slippage between what is said and what is seen – be transposed into a novel? That’s the aim of Colm Tóibín’s rewriting of the Oresteia in House of Names. It’s a bit like one of those high dives with an enormous degree of difficulty – a quadruple backflip with twist – where the possibility of making the wrong kind of splash is very ...”

“... Colm Tóibín’s frustrating new novel starts from a pleasingly skewed perspective: its narrator Richard Garay (less often, Ricardo) was brought up in Buenos Aires, child of an Argentinian businessman and an English woman who never adjusted to her new surroundings and clung in imagination to a country she had left in the early Twenties ...”

“... by Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Susan Sontag, William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Bernard and Colm Tóibín (Barnes has also made a loan to the exhibition). Some are affectionately biographical. Comparisons between Hodgkin’s art of memory and Proust’s are made.* The pleasure the pictures give – which is considerable – has a strong relation to ...”

“... I came across these phrases because I was reading some of James’s letters in parallel with Colm Tóibín’s remarkable new novel, which situates James’s tender and timid yearnings in love in a whole life of losses and evasions, but I already had lying around in my mind an argument Tóibín advanced in these ...”

“... writer’s style, and Silvers was always trying to work out if something was worth getting into. Colm Tóibín remembers going to a show by Anthony Gormley in London. ‘The show included a large steam-filled glass room where you lost your bearings immediately and went around as though in fog,’ ...”

“... to the game. Somewhere behind the coverage, though, there was a sense of something not being said. Colm Bradley, a GAA footballer and journalist, hinted at it: ‘I have played senior club football in Fermanagh for over a decade and I have been aware that Darren Graham has been on the receiving end of sectarian abuse and I would have guessed that plenty of ...”

“... and smells, diurnal rituals and rhythms of his uncle’s house. ‘The rhythms of the book,’ Colm Tóibín wrote in an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, ‘follow the faded happiness of things, the strange, remembered moments, but render them as urgent, present, almost pure.’ Its success lies in this atmosphere rather than in the ...”