“... 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 ...”

“... myself becoming richer, but it remains a popular view: Britain before the fun got going. As Andy Beckett writes in his introduction, the statement ‘Above all, we don’t want to go back to the 1970s’ has been a relentless theme in British political life almost since the day the decade ended. They are the bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the author’ was underlined. When Joyce was told about the book, he remarked that Samuel Beckett had already read it and had praised it very highly. When he then read the book, which was the last novel he read in his life, Joyce said: ‘That’s a real writer, with a true comic spirit. A really funny book.’ He spoke to a French critic ...”

“... relying wholly on stage plays, but was commissioning work for radio from avant-garde figures like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Giles Cooper. Equally ominous, News and Current Affairs in both Sound and Television built dynamic new empires, which attracted formidable young talents, took broadcasting boldly into politics, and used Features techniques ...”

“... Scott Moncrieff worked from the first Gallimard edition (which, with some exaggeration, Samuel Beckett described in his early essay on Proust as ‘abominable’); Kilmartin worked from the far more reliable 1954 Pléiade edition, while Enright, taking over from Kilmartin (sadly prevented by illness from undertaking his projected revision of ...”

“... the Romantic invention of the phenomenon and its diverse aftermath in 20th-century avatars such as Samuel Beckett and Adolf Hitler. The lonely artist inhabits a superior aesthetic realm, Currie says, ‘precisely other than the quid pro quo of the alienated many who substitute lifeless materialism and acquisitiveness for true humanity’: it was, Carey ...”

“... he has always been mainly a face in soft limelight, thus betokening the acknowledged influence of Samuel Beckett on his creator. Combine the Beckettian talking head with the pebble-collecting word-play of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, cross the result with The Diary of a Nobody and you’ve got the beginning of Sandy, but you have to slow it all down ...”

“... than in the posthumous Aesthetic Theory which Adorno intended, most fittingly, to dedicate to Samuel Beckett: ‘Art’s Utopia, the counterfactual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes on being a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe which is world history; it ...”

“... The book, its author and one of its main characters have now been mythologised in their turn. Samuel Riba, the hero of Vila-Matas’s novel, knows very little about Ireland but a good deal about its literature. He first sees Dublin in a dream, as an imaginary city that is nevertheless intensely real. But Ireland itself has long been a kind of fiction. Few ...”

“... Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton and Thomas ...”

“... and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... One of the many things that Adorno admired about Beckett’s writing was its ‘scrupulous meanness’, to borrow Joyce’s description of his own literary style in Dubliners. Beckett’s works take a few sparse elements and permutate them with Irish-scholastic ingenuity into slightly altered patterns ...”

“... relish and sadness’, as Christopher Ricks observes in his introduction to Tristram Shandy, by Samuel Beckett: ‘Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.’ If, in post-war literature, other literary ways were devised of coming to terms with the past, without presumption and without despair, I have ...”

“... Then … now … what difficulties here, for the mind.Samuel Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with history – her examples are Goethe and Pushkin – is there for contrast, that her aim is to talk about, even justify, the existence of the poet without history ...”