“... to people who are as stupid and narrow-minded as that.’ In the introduction to this reissue, Colm Tóibín remembers seeing Broderick in the bar of Buswells Hotel in Dublin: ‘He was wearing a beautifully cut three-piece suit with elaborate stripes. He was alone and he looked desolate.’ He remained a Catholic throughout his life and even ...”

“... Prize and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. On the dust-jacket of the British edition, Colm Tóibín calls it ‘a tour de force … a novel of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld’. Tóibín is also the novel’s UK publisher, under ...”

“... or over the border. Their locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration.The novelist Colm Toibin said in his Sunday Independent review of the Field Day Anthology: ‘Unreconstructed Irish nationalists have always had real difficulty with the 26 Counties. The 26 Counties are limbo, they believe, waiting for the day when our island will be united ...”

“... fortifications have long gone, and there’s a world of difference between the frightening place Colm Tóibín explored in 1987 in Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border, the still fractious place I wrote about in my 2000 book, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, and the place Garrett Carr describes in his just published The Rule of the ...”

“... Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower), Dostoevsky (Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name ...”

“... fold of silence like a star accused by the dawn light,’ which is entrancingly meaningless. If Colm Tóibín is too costive with words, Barry is too spendthrift. In contemporary Irish fiction, John Banville strikes just the right balance between opulence and discipline. Even so, Barry’s verbal extravagance makes for an intriguing, typically Irish ...”

“... Stephen King suggests in his blurb on the back cover, and provides ‘documentary evidence’, Colm Tóibín says, ‘of rural America in a time of crisis’ – a kind of new, new journalism then. Developing her interest in merging factual circumstance with the invented (Lark and Termite used a series of photographs as well as historical information ...”

“... at home, but for a huge diasporic audience. Whether the w0rk of Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín, Patrick McCabe and Dermot Bolger constitutes a ‘new direction in Irish fiction’ is less certain. The major trope of Irish fiction is certainly no longer Modernist paralysis but change – Tóibín’s ...”

“... fight on her hands to be who she was, surviving the double-takers. One night, I introduced her to Colm Tóibín, and she did her ‘bottle through the table’ trick, which he put straight into the novel he was writing (The Story of the Night). At the Groucho Club, there would be too much Sancerre with various Britpop loons, a bit of napping under the ...”

“... failures. (The first of these was conceived in rooms that Woolson had once rented in Oxford.) If Colm Tóibín is right to suggest, in his novel The Master (2004), that there is something of her unrequited devotion in The Ambassadors’ Maria Gostrey as well, then James reversed their tutelary relation and made Woolson his guide to Europe. The macabre ...”

“... powers of attraction (in his fictionalised version of Blunt’s affair with Lady Gregory, Colm Tóibín has her think of him as like a ‘goose stuffed at Christmas’). At this distance he appears a faintly disturbing but almost ludicrous figure, a sexual predator who was also a sentimentalist. In 1891, Margot, aged 28, still unmarried and ...”

“... she inspires, while rejecting the meaning of the symbols and the doctrines associated with them. Colm Tóibín, in The Testament of Mary,* captures this state of doubled consciousness, and with a tragedian’s insight into her inner conflict has entered into her voice, expressing the anguished struggle between love and doubt, faith and rage, trust and ...”

“... quoted above. It doesn’t matter whether we want to murder our mothers because we do it anyway. Colm Tóibín wryly suggests J.M. Synge tried bohemianism as ‘a new way of killing his [doggedly Protestant] mother’, but Proust’s idea is that we don’t have to try at all. We can’t really acknowledge this fact, he suggests, because we would ...”

“... A brogue isn’t a foreign accent, not exactly: it can be a way of speaking your own tongue. Colm Tóibín recently recalled that when his grandfather was arrested for his part in the Easter Rising, he was sent to prison in Wales, and found to his surprise – his dismay? – that the guards were all Welsh speakers, while the Irish prisoners all ...”

“... the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In his review of Truman Capote’s letters in the LRB Colm Tóibín lists Capote’s many dislikes, including Beyond the Fringe, which he thought ‘rather dreary’. I never could think of much to say to Kenneth Tynan or he to me but whenever we met in the early 1960s he’d make a point of telling me that of ...”