“... English realism was a gain rather than a loss, as was its eventual freedom from British rule. When James Joyce wrote to a friend that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ he spoke for many more Irish writers than himself. Yet to be free of a convention is not to ignore ...”

“... to Glyn Jones’s The Blue Bed, and that his long poetic tribute to Karl Kraus in In Memoriam James Joyce was lifted wholesale from a TLS front-page article. Grieve furnished MacDiarmid with a childhood that drew several elements from other people’s books and lives. MacDiarmid remembered the marbles he had played as a boy, the ...”

“... of the less well known of these, such as Anthony Hamilton, an Anglo-Irish Jacobite who followed James II to France and there, writing in French, inaugurated the tradition of elegant mockery of the excesses of The Arabian Nights that opened the way for the rationalist arabesques of Voltaire and others. Warner might have included many more. ...”

“... printed works, on occasion, for various reasons. No novelist has made such a job of it as Henry James. In July 1905 he began the task of revising his life’s work, in order to create a final statement, a complete collection of his works, called from its inception the New York Edition. James actually believed that this ...”

“... copiously employed throughout the text: the use of portmanteau neologisms in the tradition that James Joyce took over from Humpty Dumpty. The effectiveness of the device is more limited than is often allowed: it’s an easy trick to learn, and while the odd hit in this mode attracts praise, who keeps a tally of the numerous misses? But what would seem ...”

“... The set-piece descriptions don’t always come off, especially when he’s been tippling the James Joyce: ‘In the shower, swallowing water, the water broke and hissed on my head, while heavy drops, after loving my abdomen, touched, rhythmically, my insteps.’ He’s also excessively impressed by the joys of repetition. Riffs are cruelly stretched ...”

“... years. Swinburne is devoted to him at the start, as is Siegfried Sassoon at the close, and Henry James is going to address over four hundred letters to him. He weathers two major storms, one emotional and the other resulting from a rash claim that if not a poet he is at least a scholar. Becoming Librarian of the House of Lords, he luxuriates acceptably amid ...”

“... books that abound in literary parallels. Only the standard names are uttered in passing – Joyce, Synge, MacNeice, Yeats, Heaney. However, Gretchen’s view of Ireland has certainly come out of a book: she arrives in the country nurturing obtuse expectations. Word, for example, of the destruction of Georgian Dublin hasn’t percolated through to this ...”

“... out that Dorothy Richardson’s experiments with prose style had something in common with those of James Joyce; you don’t, however, catch anyone applauding Joyce for having written out of the abyss of masculine consciousness, though it might have been said of him with equal pertinence. Most of the studies under review ...”

“... a university there. Gerard Manley Hopkins would teach at the place for a miserable four years, and James Joyce, who considered Newman the finest prose stylist in English, would become a student at its successor institution, University College, Dublin. Cornwell has some strikingly astute comments about the dissident young ...”

“... and Ryder, a long novel which included a veiled attack on her father. She met Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Man Ray, Brancusi. She and Thelma slotted in neatly with the American expats Stein called the ‘Lost Generation’. Thelma was lost and losing it more and more. Her life with Barnes (or Robin Vote’s life with Nora Flood), as described ...”

“... Henry James Sr was a redoubtable patriarch who received a large inheritance from his father – an Irish immigrant who had made a fortune in upstate New York – and spent it on a life of leisure and religiosity. He shuttled back and forth to Europe on a kind of one-man cultural exchange which combined the grand tour with a Continental education for his children ...”

“... the effect is of a Babel of voices talking brilliantly/derangedly. Here, for instance, is James Axton, narrator of The Names: Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to the travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975 ...”

“... I was stoned out of my mind. Back in the room, my father was absorbed in an article about Henry James. I discovered that the shower emitted hot water. It felt like divine intervention. I’ve no idea how long I spent under the nozzle, transfixed by the warm rush. When I emerged, the room was four inches deep in steaming water. The drain was blocked, but my ...”