“... glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay’. Two years earlier, W.B. Yeats had published In the Seven Woods, which was full of references to fashions changing and a woman ageing; it had ‘Adam’s Curse’ as its centrepiece, in which the ‘beautiful mild woman’, on hearing the poet outline the difficulty of creating ...”

“... detect analogies, often defined as prolepses, between 18th-century and later writers. Flaubert and Yeats are frequent presences, and Mailer turns up in the index four times. Rawson’s past is definitely prologue. In a writer so self-consciously uppish, so concerned with tonalities, so in love with the demotic, and so free-ranging in his ...”

“... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...”

“... Woolf: ‘His looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the sonnets, whose notion of willing sacrifice in a noble cause had unerringly caught the public ...”

“... heard in his head. His last major works, the Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale ...”

“... grandeur: he had been married to Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter, and had been a friend of Yeats. I found myself sitting beside him in the student bar and it was astonishing and fascinating to hear someone talk with familiarity and slight contempt about Maud Gonne, and then withdraw into himself, become silent and vague and uncomfortable, refusing to ...”

“... of his illnesses, headed ‘Woes’. We went to the National Library to see an exhibition on W.B. Yeats and had the odd experience of Seamus talking between us as well as on a screen cocooned in a booth. Afterwards we walked under the fading sign high on a gable-end for Finn’s Hotel, where Nora Barnacle was working when Joyce first met her. There was a nice ...”

“... connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the mothers of ...”

“... Land under England was written, the glamour of fascism touched Æ’s friend and associate W.B. Yeats, who pledged his support for Eoin O’Duffy’s militaristic Blueshirts. Francis Stuart, a self-condemned Irish Dostoevsky, who was also published in yellow-jacket Gollancz editions in the 1930s, had a special gift for putting himself on the wrong side of ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art ...”

“... her own life and everything else, and this is true insofar as 20th-century myth-making poets, like Yeats and Blok, are direct inheritors of European Romanticism, giving it a personal and individual life. Tsvetaeva was in a sense a more thoroughgoing, a more absolute romantic, but, like Yeats, she had a ...”

“... Mussolini has a play on in the West End, Eisenhower is challenged by Jimmy Raine on sentry-go, Yeats lectures tediously at Oxford and has his Steinach operation. The Mandelstams, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the ...”

“... in realism and more hospitable to artistic experiment than the British mainland (Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett). There were, to be sure, at least two towering homegrown modernist writers, but both were internal émigrés within English society, as opposed to literal expatriates like James, Conrad and Eliot. Woolf was a radical woman married to a ...”

“... parents. Talent and determination led him to work with and be staunchly generous towards Williams, Yeats, Eliot and many other poets, musicians, artists and intellectuals; but acting as if there wasn’t a darn thing he didn’t know also produced his economic and political theories, his baggy Cantos, his conviction that he was the man to be entrusted with ...”