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“... sources. It is a very good example of the type of specialised study on which Arthur Marwick, James Cronin and Jane Lewis have had to depend while putting together their syntheses. In this case, the omission of Scotland and Ireland might seem uncontentious. Ireland’s was another story. The Scottish narrative would be similar in respect of ...”

“... 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 hard to ...”

“... considerations of a less starkly ultimate kind might arise in connection with the subtitle of James Knowlson’s new biography: ‘The Life of Samuel Beckett’. (The main title looks suspiciously like a publisher’s wheeze, a low-grade spin on Beckett’s desperate formula for the modern artist as doomed to fail or, more tantalisingly, as driven by a ...”

“... and dealer in pornography. Among the contents were letters from various notabilities, including James Joyce and Parnell. Thirty years later, long after disowning his foster-parents and losing track of the box, he speaks of the letters to the librarian of the Celtic Library and is offered a substantial sum for them. Desperate for money he forges them, from ...”

“... of dealing with social paralysis and national demands. They were both haunted by the spectre of James Joyce. Borges was, he proudly wrote in 1925, ‘the first traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses’. But this is not entirely true. Instead he was, as he admitted, one of the first of the hordes who had read the novel, but ...”

“... of the most ambitious – she would become the office manager – was Eileen Joyce, the sister of James, who had fluent Italian after years spent in Trieste. She went there in 1910, according to her daughter Bozena, ‘in order to cultivate her fine voice’, and lived with James and Nora, and sometimes their brother ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... by the use of a caravan, loaned by his eccentric editor at the Architectural Review, Hubert de Cronin Hastings. Pevsner’s wife, Lola, always the driver, towed it along the lanes and byways of the county, come rain, ice and snow. As they swung along, the movement of the caravan made the car veer unpredictably. To rule out worse hazards and the misery of ...”

“... of the magazine, then only recently transformed by its odd and near invisible editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Betjeman’s jocular, impressionable soul was temporarily stolen by the hard men of the Modern Movement. Then, after Betjeman resigned, along came Pevsner, to hammer home the determinist message with which the magazine was obsessed. Or that is ...”

“... as clever Victor Gollancz spotted when he picked her out for his list as a successor to A.J. Cronin. Having said that, one hears the sad voice of E.M. Forster: ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ He calls the story ‘a low atavistic form’ and envisages an audience of cave-persons ‘gaping round the camp-fire, fatigued with ...”

“... 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 At ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​ , who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...”

“... 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 dreams. Beckett ...”

“... Caramanian Exile’ (which draws parallels between the British and Ottoman empires), or James Quinn on the travel memoirs and historical writing of the militant nationalist John Mitchel after he was transported to Bermuda, the reach of the British Empire matters as much as the comparative discussion. But Transitions is traditional in the way it ...”