“... thereby making one reflect bitterly on one’s own mental laziness. (He was greatly influenced by Samuel Beckett, who is the supreme master of permutation.) I am thinking particularly of the famous analysis of Velazquez’s Las Meninas as the ‘representation of a representation’, at the beginning of The Order of Things (curiously, we learn that it ...”

“... time he came to the house, he brought me a novel, a Penguin Modern Classic. It was Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett; the copy, he said, belonged to one of his ‘disciples’. The cover had a grim but beautiful picture, a pencil sketch, of a human skull. In the pages inside, difficult words had been occasionally underlined, and their meanings noted. A ...”

“... for a setting by Elliott Carter – but one can’t help thinking he’d love to have the chance. Samuel Beckett rather lightly undertook the penning of a libretto for pre-minimalist American composer Morton Feldman. It has been averred (by Michael Tippett, who always acts as his own librettist) that a good opera plot should be summarisable on the back ...”

“... her reason for choosing Anaïs Nin as her third biographical subject, after Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett. Bair is not making a case for re-evaluating Nin’s fiction. Her claim is that although Nin was ‘not an original thinker’ and a ‘minor writer whose novels are seldom read these days’, she nonetheless merits a substantial biography ...”

“... later spectacularly re-appeared. In Ireland, the three ‘internationalist’ poets singled out by Samuel Beckett – Thomas MacGreevey, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey – all stuttered to a standstill in mid-career: MacGreevey turned away from poetry altogether; Devlin never published another collection after Lough Derg and Other Poems (1946), though his ...”

“... of these writers are as diverse as their educational and political connections. One has produced Samuel Beckett on Cairo radio; another is ‘widely read in Egyptology, mythology and mysticism, including Sufism’; a third ‘acknowledges a debt to the detective story and to The Thousand and One Nights and other folk literature’. Yet, in spite of this ...”

“... through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross’, usually billed as by ‘Samuel Beckett and others’, and read now mainly for Beckett’s contribution. The other essays are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot ...”

“... to be an expert commentator on vanity’s machinations: Auden said something disparaging about Samuel Beckett getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nikos said: ‘Who else is there?’ Auden shook his head so all the sagging wrinkles shook and said: ‘There’s me.’ At Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more ...”

“... have a weird stylistic ellipticism that brings to mind a marriage of late Henry James and Samuel Beckett (to whom Kelman is regularly compared). Women are often significant by their absence in Kelman’s fiction, but in a novel where identity is so much called into question the female figures are especially hard to see or to understand. There are ...”

“... stupid and venal. He was not without discerning admirers, and won the admiration and friendship of Samuel Beckett, with whom he occasionally claimed equality of esteem. But he failed to see that avant-garde novelists rarely become bestsellers, believing that truth would necessarily prevail over fictions (lies). He defended and advanced his cause with much ...”

“... More surprising are powerful statements from Ernst Bloch, who gives Clark his minatory title, and Samuel Beckett, who underscores the alien aspect in Cézanne that intrigues Clark. Above all, as Clark debates these others, he argues with himself, and though he often gathers his readers into the ‘we’ of his thinking, he sometimes imagines them as ...”

“... recur throughout Vonnegut’s writing (at this level one cannot carp about repetitiveness: as if Samuel Beckett should have changed his vision of our existence for the sake of variety in his art). Vonnegut evidently admires the American school of Abstract Expressionism (of which he was a literary contemporary), particularly for their capacity to hand ...”

“... In writing what was to be a definitive study, Bair, the author of a celebrated biography of Samuel Beckett, flew from Philadelphia to Paris every month from January 1981 to March 1986 for taped interviews with Beauvoir that lasted two to three hours. They form the most vivid and significant passages of the book, as Beauvoir, fortified by her ...”

“... St Andrew’s Hospital, was Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce. Local rumour has it that Samuel Beckett paid her annual visits. He was making, perhaps, a wistful return to the town where he earned his entry in Wisden, playing cricket for Trinity College, Dublin, against Northamptonshire. The alphabet had been part of Lucia’s ...”

“... effect’ had their origins in the artificiality of the German cabaret clown Valentin. Even Samuel Beckett deconstructed the slapstick low comedians for his tragi-comic avatars. ‘I never realised that I was doing anything but trying to make people laugh when I threw my custard pies and took my pratfalls,’ Keaton said, but he starred in ...”