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“... Terry Eagleton’s new book, not merely a series of studies in Irish culture but one of the most noteworthy contributions to it of recent times, realigns Irish writing within contemporary debates about cultural politics, adhering to the particularity of the Irish situation without becoming mired in its bitter complexities. There is no master narrative as such, although recurrent themes play a governing role in the eight essays ...”

“... and many others like it, refuses the restful incarnation in the actual which is characteristic of Seamus Heaney. It harnesses energy but does not convert it into something else. its force remains pure, does not become weight. In that respect it is closer to modern French poetry (like that of Bonnefoy or Supervielle or Frenaud) than to poetry in English. It is ...”

“... to the Irish experience. In saying ‘civil’, I do not mean or imply ‘genteel’. Seamus Heaney, writing of early Irish nature poetry, mentions how it can communicate ‘Little jabs of delight in the elemental’ and distinguishes this from the effect of the bulk (not all) of English verse. ‘It almost seems,’ he says, ‘that since the ...”

“... The first three of the four chapters in Graham Hough’s book were the Lord Northcliffe Lectures in Literature given at University College London in February 1983. The audience was general and the lectures were pitched accordingly. Yet all Yeatsian specialists will profit from this book and the ‘radical simplification’ of Yeats’s occult philosophy which it so lucidly achieves ...”

“... When it was first published in Ireland in 1986, Stones of Aran won a literary prize and a great deal of praise. It is a strange book, at once a meditation on and a journey around the island of Aran off the west coast of Ireland. The meditation takes its form from the journey, as does the journey from the meditation. Although the island itself, in all its coastal detail, its geology, history, folklore, flora and fauna, is the book’s subject, it is oddly elusive ...”

“... In July 1933, at the height of his involvement with the Blueshirts, the Irish Fascist organisation, Yeats wrote: ‘It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is satisfied with thought … The chance of being shot is raising everybody’s spirits enormously.’ However invigorating the prospect, the fulfilment did not come ...”

“... In 1914 Patrick MacGill’s first novel, Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. In the same year, Joyce’s Dubliners sold 499 copies, 120 of them bought by the author. In 1915, MacGill published a companion novel, The Rat-Pit, which was also highly successful and contained a Preface in which the author avowed himself to be ‘highly gratified’ by the success attained by Children of the Dead End ‘in Britain and abroad ...”

“... and all that. Ideological tides often reach Irish shores just as they start to ebb elsewhere. Seamus Deane, General Editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, has constantly applied the Marxist sense of crisis to a ‘political crisis’ whose epicentre is Northern Ireland. FitzPatrick locates crisis in the heads of a Dublin avant-garde who ...”

“... for ‘Englishness’ too. For example, what today can we mean by ‘English’ literature? Seamus Deane begins his Short History of Irish Literature by asserting that the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ for the body of writing with which he is concerned is now anachronistic. Deane here is lending powerful support to the ...”

“... expressed by Monied Interest in Dickens’s story ‘The Flight’ might have made an epigraph for Seamus Deane’s The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England. It was Monied Interest who declared that it was ‘quite enough for him that the French are revolutionary – “and always at it”.’ The eight essays that make up what Froude would have ...”

“... was ordained by Yeats, has lately been attracting the attention of academics like McCormack and Seamus Deane, both of whom have written about him in The Crane Bag. Burke’s social observations are worth repeating: Irish cabins, he said, were ‘scarcely distinguishable from the Dunghill’ and the furniture they contained ‘much fitter to be lamented ...”

“... Verse (1986), that a ‘Northern Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival ...”

“... up again in Northern Ireland in 1968. Several of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the ...”

“... in forthright terms a pamphlet of mine, published in Belfast as part of a series that included Seamus Deane, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker, James Simmons, and several other Northern Irish poets whose voices were beginning to raise themselves in the mid-Sixties. To hear John Carey now, almost a quarter of a century later, go farther ...”

“... indeed, this anthology has for some years past been heralded as the major Field Day intervention. Seamus Deane explains the imagined significance of the anthology: ‘It is important to do this now because the political crisis in Ireland, precipitated in 1968, but in gestation for many years before that date, has exposed the absence within the island of ...”