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“... 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.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... Thomas Mann’s​ most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him ...”

“... and I scribble each morning almost as if demented by years of fictional starvation. I feel like Thomas Mann when he spoke of the ‘passionate truancy’ of his political speeches and writings in opposition to Hitler: a truancy which aided rather than subtracted from his creative work. After eight years in rural Suffolk I was fed up with life as a ...”

“... Talks even though it was telly by that time. She was happily married for many years to the actor Frank Wyndham Goldie.’ ‘Her order of service is a scream,’ I said. ‘A reading from The West Highland Railway by John Thomas?’ ‘Well, there you are.’ ‘Also a reading from The Liverpool Repertory ...”

“... example), which was ended by executive order after being exposed in hearings conducted by Senator Frank Church in the 1970s. But Obama’s Justice Department insisted that a drone strike against Awlaki would not be an assassination, or an extrajudicial execution, or a deprivation of life without due process of law, as prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. Due ...”

“... I should like the dominion of the earth.’ One of Vidal’s best essays is on the Oz novels of L. Frank Baum, and like Baum, Vidal is curious about the extreme forms of power that arise in democracies. In Glinda of Oz, the last in the series, the Supreme Dictator explains himself: ‘I’m the Supreme Dictator of all, and I am elected once a year. This is a ...”

“... my childhood was a blissful one,’ he writes. But it was not all cake and ice cream. He is frank to say his mother ‘was volatile … A shouter, a smacker, a frowner, and a glowerer.’ His father, a big man (six feet two), had a ‘warm, hesitant smile’ which gave way unpredictably to ‘the terrible temper, not so much anger as eruptive and ...”

“... 1 thirty years later. It was translated into English two years after that: just in time for Anne Frank to read it in her secret Amsterdam annexe and to note, impressed, that Brandi had spent ‘forty years’ writing it. (It was, she hinted, tough going – ‘I read fifty pages in five days’ – but ‘Very interesting!’)Many eminent historians have ...”

“... indefensible thought that The Unconsoled is the greatest novel written in English in my lifetime. Frank Kermode gives probably the best account of it – ‘the effect is of tragic farce, and Ishiguro, unlike his characters, works well in that destructive setting’ – in his reviews of Never Let Me Go and Nocturnes in the LRB.Unlike Ryder, Klara is not ...”

“... Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied.’ ‘Didn’t I?’ says Blair, and subsequently sends a charming letter of apology. The thought that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime ...”

“... receives the most discourteous rebuff of all – at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind ...”

“... in the South. Whites were also lynched: Wobblies in the labour wars in the north-west in 1919; Leo Frank, a Jew wrongly convicted of murder, in Marietta, Georgia in 1915. But the story of African Americans constitutes a special case. No other post-slave society turned to terror lynching to maintain white racial dominance. At the memorial’s threshold is a ...”

“... the subject nor the underlying theme of his work, any more than it is in the paintings of Alma Thomas, Norman Lewis, Jack Whitten, Ed Clark or Frank Bowling.Jackson belongs in the company of these black modernists, who are only now being recognised by museums that have long ignored them. White institutions weren’t the ...”

“... architects on this West Coast gravy train are, predictably, those consummate exterior decorators Frank Gehry and Thomas Heatherwick. They are unlikely to cede control to the rodents inhabiting their bespoke boxes which plainly derive from the biospheres and domes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Those are among the more ...”

“... Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long as he remained in Trieste or Zurich or Paris he was able to take the part of maestro, conducting the chorus of voices in the parlour of the grandest house they had ...”