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“... to its excellent beginnings. The explanations greatly exceed the action in volume and complexity. Anthony Cronin has left himself so much expository work to do that the narrative tends to lose itself in conversation. The plot forks and dwindles, and the overall contours of the story are those of a ragged old parsnip. But if the plotting flags, the humour ...”

“... it may be worth adding that his brother’s account – as it reads to me – is corroborated by Anthony Cronin in his reissued Dead as Doornails. This is a memoir of Dublin’s Kavanagh, Behan and Flann O’Brien, and of London’s Colquhoun, MacBryde and Maclaren-Ross. Six kenspeckle characters – ‘and a rum lot too, as the devil said when he read ...”

“... and never wrote anything else of comparable sustained exactness. All of which makes the title of Anthony Cronin’s biography, No Laughing Matter, fit its subject, although its subject is the most purely comic Irish writer. The reader, therefore, comes to Cronin’s book with expectations and curiosities which are ...”

“... hotel, had called Joyce ‘that refurbisher of skivvies’ stories’. As O’Brien’s biographer Anthony Cronin rightly pointed out, ‘it is charitable to assume that O’Nolan had already begun to hear too much about Joyce’s influence on his book from his readers in Dublin, whether friends or enemies.’ In 1961 O’Brien wrote to his editor: ‘If ...”

“... apart, and this must have consequences for the project of a literary biography. Both Knowlson and Cronin follow biographical custom in shaping their narratives between a birth and a death, but both also point out that, in Beckett’s terms, ‘life’ begins before birth. Beckett claimed to have (largely disagreeable) memories of the pre-natal (according to ...”

“... worked in Customs and Excise, and who left twelve children behind. According to his biographer, Anthony Cronin, Customs and Excise did not offer a pension. These are the useful facts I stumble across in the lives of Irish writers, to explain old tragedies that are nearly my own. I tell my mother that there was no paper to sign, and she does not really ...”

“... from The Life of Riley, a satire and semi-autobiography published in 1964 by the Irish novelist Anthony Cronin: I betook myself to a labour exchange, a tastefully appointed building in Camden Town, looking like something left over from the Festival of Britain which had been spat on too often and could never be cleanly swept out. There were long queues ...”

“... the same time as Pinter was Patrick Magee, who was born in Armagh in 1924. Beckett’s biographer Anthony Cronin suggests that playing non-Irish roles in these productions had given Magee his most peculiar voice. Cronin describes the voice as ‘harsh, gravelly, which had little superficial charm but had a hypnotic ...”

“... critical undertones’). Prematurely aged and alcoholic – according to his friend and biographer Anthony Cronin, by his late forties O’Nolan was generally so pickled by three in the afternoon that he retired to bed – he was never not in the position of having to carve out a place for himself as a writer. The failure to find an American publisher for ...”

“... a fall from a horse (but was it really a car crash? did he really fall from his horse?). The poet Anthony Cronin, who later became an adviser, remembers Haughey visiting him in Clare, and after the visit rumours spreading that Haughey was going to buy the local hotel, or other property in the area. As Minister for Agriculture, he had stood up to the ...”

“... main, certainly our most detailed source for this story is an item that seems to be out of print: Anthony Cronin’s biography No Laughing Matter, published in 1989. Rarely can a book have borne such an apposite title. Cronin casts O’Brien’s life as a relentless catalogue of frustration, bitterness and ...”

“... which dominated Beckett’s own household. They were bohemians. They gave parties at which, as Anthony Cronin noted in his biography of Beckett, ‘people sat on the floor and afterwards quite possibly slept on it.’ No one among the Sinclairs minded Beckett staying in bed all morning and having no worldly ambitions and many vague and high-toned ...”

“... and Pasquale D’Elia, and it has also been retold by many other writers, among them Vincent Cronin in his Wise Man from the West (with a companion piece, A Pearl to India, on the career of De’Nobili). Ricci’s introduction into China of Western clocks, Western astronomy and Western mathematics has also attracted much attention from historians of ...”