Search Results

“... and shocks to the international system. Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace and Sean McMeekin’s July 1914 both bear the imprint of these perspectival shifts. They are both attentive to the play of contingency in crises that involved multilateral interactions among numerous sovereign actors. They both have interesting things to say ...”

“... than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped for heaven. It must be fun not believing in anything, and having ...”

“... an exercise in violence. It was this paranoia that left Ireland susceptible, in Burke’s view, to French revolutionary infection and made the removal of the Ascendancy a political priority. Eagleton’s fourth chapter, ‘Changing the Question’, which is a powerful analysis of the dialogue of the deaf between England and Ireland after the Union, might have ...”

“... thing I couldn’t bear,’ he realises later, ‘was myself, whatever that had become.’ Tana French has gained a following over the past decade for her riveting series of police procedurals, the Dublin Murder Squad series. She has been celebrated as a stylish genre defier, in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Richard Price – and her books ...”

“... message not much changed. Tolstoy is an English writer to the English, a German to the Germans, French to the French: yet we do not doubt that we are reading the same Tolstoy. The aggressively autochthonous Joyce has become one of the culture-heroes of international Modernism. But there are areas that are more resistant ...”

“... at all. His good fortune, he wrote in The View from Paris, his collection of essays on postwar French intellectuals, was to have entered on his professional life in the mid-1960s when Sartre was ceding the territory to Roland Barthes; when, as John put it, ‘the first rustlings of Literary Theory’ – he gave it capital letters – ‘were to be ...”

“... symbol de Gaulle marching down the Champs-Elysées at the head of the victorious Allied troops, French students might have said anything in praise of America. Something in between? Perhaps a lost star wandering high among the fleets of stars, seeking, losing, finding his proper station from which to view and mark that postage stamp of earth, as he called ...”

“... the small hours, usually ending with a round of Irish rebel songs, lead by the melodious tenor of Sean Malarkey, a shy man who had to be prevailed on to sing. One night he regaled us with an anti-colonial number that included the line ‘Out, out, ye Saxon dogs’. An Englishman called Don Griffin, who, like my father at the time, worked as a guard for ...”

“... throw over the enterprise. He would go on to write critiques both of the modern Irish state in the Sean Lemass era and of power relations in Northern Ireland (in collaboration with other figures from Northern Ireland’s leftist intelligentsia), to redefine the attempted politics of reconciliation in the Edwardian era and to continue the story of ...”

“... Catholic and absolutist, landed at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. In April, the House of Commons responded by voting for war with France. Initially, that war, which would ...”

“... visited, camping out in the corner of a field with Ness and another friend, Qhuram Awan, known as Sean, who he unconvincingly claimed were his hostages. On Saturday afternoon he called 999 to declare war on Northumbria Police, accusing the force of persecuting him. Soon afterwards, he shot PC David Rathband, a traffic policeman, at a roundabout on the ...”

“... proved a great man; de Valera, a great man indeed, though limited in the range of his vision; and Sean Lemass, a modest man who tried to drag Ireland into the 20th century and is honoured for the attempt. The five hundred pages in which the political and economic history of modern Ireland is narrated don’t claim any particular novelty. The events are the ...”

“... century. Its practical impact on the world was ‘far more profound and global’ than that of the French Revolution a century earlier: for ‘a mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the [revolution] … and Lenin’s organisational ...”

“... In October 1938 – in his first outing as Flann O’Brien – he intervened in a debate between Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor on ‘Ideals for an Irish Theatre’, in the letters pages of the Irish Times. The spat was self-consciously intellectual, with O’Connor arguing for a return to ‘peasant quality’ and O’Faolain in favour of importing ...”

“... in Ireland has made an unexpected comeback. Earlier generations – that of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain and, before them, of George Moore and James Joyce – had established it as the quintessential genre for a society still in the process of inventing itself. If the novel dealt with established societies such as England or France, the theory ...”