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“... on a long-distance train, the friendly editor suggesting with a joviality worthy of Orwell’s O’Brien that there was no need for his services, since every author now – whatever his intentions – in fact conforms naturally by a sort of automatic instinct. About the same time Novy Mir published Seasons of the Year by Vera Panova, a leisurely ...”

“... which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a famine in which British bungling and indifference played a considerable part, a sizeable segment of the Irish population was ...”

“... pick up a scrap of paper from the front step. It reads: ‘Just remember I am a witch.’ Ooh-er. John Huston referred to the three Guinness girls, of whom Maureen was one, as ‘lovely witches’. To say that someone was brought up as a wealthy, landed aristocrat (moneyed, narcissistic mother; aristocratic, fey father) is tantamount to saying they had a ...”

“... and fumed at a ‘smart-alecky’ review of some avant-garde magazines, deciding it was written by John Willett (its real author was in fact his near-namesake Ian Hamilton, never the warmest admirer of the Scottish avant-garde). He felt too good for the Scottish papers and too isolated for the English ones, though when visitors beat a path to his door they ...”

“... really been merely a catalogue of horrors? Is this the country that produced Ulysses and Flann O’Brien, exports culture rather than armaments and evolved in a handful of decades from a benightedly parochial nation to a liberal, multicultural one? You might well find little positive in the place if, like Barry, you consistently adopt the perspective of ...”

“... among Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins, playing the part of an anti-Anti-Jacobin (much as Conor Cruise O’Brien used to be an anti-Anti-Communist, before he found other fish to fry). To write about the works of Hazlitt, one needs a bias towards history and philosophy. David Bromwich’s study concentrates on the latter discipline, for he is appraising Hazlitt’s ...”

“... of the 1916 men were told and retold as perfect Christian parables.’ She quotes Conor Cruise O’Brien, who points out that the emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Rising made the partition of Ireland almost inevitable. But she is right to believe that the great turnaround in public opinion about the Rising between 1916 and 1918 had much to do with ...”

“... are, forbidden to hold any direct communication with the ‘foreign’ British Army. Conor Cruise O’Brien warned that this Council would be a mistake. Power-sharing was a sufficiently difficult, if also promising experiment, and it would have been far wiser at this stage to have concentrated on that. The Unionist Party had previously expressed some support ...”

“... quirks are well to the fore. Maeve Binchy remembers wanting to swop her sister for a rabbit. Edna O’Brien, at a young age, would talk to the trees surrounding her Clare home. One of Molly Keane’s recollections is of horrid food. Joan Lingard can summon up a time when it wasn’t foolhardy to walk the streets of Belfast after dark. All stress their luck in ...”

“... themselves to this ‘human interest’ approach than they used to be. Three years ago, Patrick O’Brien, then director of the Institute of Historical Research, disparaged the whole genre of political biography. He argued that ‘just as there are scholars of the performing arts who prefer to contemplate actors rather than acting, players rather than ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... story itself becomes part of the process of surviving. One of the purest examples of this is Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Man I Killed’, a preternaturally lucid description of a young Vietnamese soldier blown up by the narrator’s grenade. O’Brien’s precise, almost entranced detailing of the star-shaped hole where one ...”

“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... even foreword mail. An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under ...”