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Knife and Fork Question

Miles Taylor: The Chartist Movement, 29 November 2001

The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838-50 
edited by Gregory Claeys.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, April 2001, 1 85196 330 8
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... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: In Washington, 7 February 1991

... feast for an analytical historian. For now, everything in Washington has narrowed to a saying of John Kennedy’s, uttered after the Bay of Pigs, to the effect that ‘success has many fathers – failure is an orphan.’ The debate in Congress, which was very protracted and in some ways very intense, was in reality extremely limited. The partisans of the ...

Our Founder

John Bayley: Papa Joyce, 19 February 1998

John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father 
by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello.
Fourth Estate, 493 pp., £20, October 1997, 1 85702 417 6
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... rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce. Like the violins of Cremona, Dubliners, Ulysses, 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 ...

Local Heroes

John Horgan, 7 February 1985

Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland 1832-1885 
by Theodore Hoppen.
Oxford, 569 pp., £29.50, October 1984, 0 19 822630 6
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Ireland and the English Crisis 
by Tom Paulin.
Bloodaxe, 222 pp., £12.95, January 1985, 0 906427 63 0
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The Great Dan: A Biography of Daniel O’Connell 
by Charles Chenevix Trench.
Cape, 345 pp., £10.95, September 1984, 0 224 02176 1
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... the union with Britain was essential, but has travelled quite a distance since then. Conor Cruise O’Brien, meanwhile, has been voyaging in the opposite direction, setting out as a dutiful supporter of the Anti-Partition League and ending up as undoubtedly the Northern Unionists’ favourite Southern politician. Reading Paulin’s withering essay on ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Censorship in Ireland, 21 March 2013

... it is?’ ‘No,’ said the man, and he shook out his newspaper, leaving my father to walk away. John McGahern went to London in 1954 to work for a few months on the building sites: ‘When I walked off the boat at Holyhead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great English writers I had read and studied – I ...

The Hero Brush

Edmund Gordon: Colum McCann, 12 September 2013

TransAtlantic 
by Colum McCann.
Bloomsbury, 298 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4088 2937 0
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... best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a ...

Seeing things

Rosemary Dinnage, 4 December 1980

The Story of Ruth 
by Morton Schatzman.
Duckworth, 306 pp., £6.95, September 1980, 0 7156 1504 1
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... The jacket of The Story of Ruth is adorned with praise from the famous: Edna O’Brien, among others, found it ‘disturbing and quite fascinating’, and Doris Lessing ‘a valuable book, an original’. It is a pity it comes in the kind of packaging that will repel the averagely fastidious reader. Duckworth have printed it in type about one size smaller than that of a Janet and John reader, and sub-titled it ‘one woman’s haunting psychiatric odyssey ...

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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... and most caustic satire of her book for one of the blockbusters of 1980s Cather criticism: Sharon O’Brien’s influential Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, a massive, often ponderous study of the writer’s early life and career published by Oxford in 1987. O’Brien’s claim to fame, put somewhat cartoonishly, is that ...

On the Threshold

Tom Nairn, 23 March 1995

Frameworks for the Future 
Northern Ireland Office, 37 pp., February 1995Show More
Northern Ireland: The Choice 
by Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden.
Penguin, 256 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 0 14 023541 8
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... on the process so far still reflect that stability, which was also stagnation. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (1994) is a good example. In a Postscript he foresees disaster for peace because no real movement in Ireland is possible at all: ‘The peace dreamed of, both by Church and State, is as always ...

Life of Brian

Kevin Barry, 25 January 1990

No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien 
by Anthony Cronin.
Grafton, 260 pp., £16.95, October 1989, 0 246 12836 4
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... of Cloud, Redemption and The Flowering Cross. Ten years earlier Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien, had written At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman. These two works, of which only the first was published in the author’s lifetime, differ from those of Beckett and Stuart in many ways, not least in the sharp, impersonal brevity of O’Nolan’s ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... 1919, just as de Valera was departing for the United States, a letter was received via Paris from John Devoy, the Fenian leader who since the 1870s had been a key figure among the Irish in America, giving news of a split on the subject of Ireland’s strategic relations to Britain which thereafter divided Irish America. Three letters from de Valera to the ...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

Home and Away 
by Steve Ellis.
Bloodaxe, 62 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240271
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The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 48 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3227 2
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The Frighteners 
by Sean O’Brien.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240134
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... rolled into one. It crops up twice in this batch of collections, in poems by Steve Ellis and Sean O’Brien.The opening of ‘Summer ’84’ by Steve Ellis provides a fair sample:My father-in-law adored a drought.At the first sign of a sun in stasis,cracked soil, rumours on the radio,he’d mobilise an army of bucketsand scurry all over the ...

Bogey Man

Richard Mayne, 15 July 1982

Camus: A Critical Study of his Life and Work 
by Patrick McCarthy.
Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp., £12.50, April 1982, 0 241 10603 6
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Albert Camus: A Biography 
by Herbert Lottman.
Picador, 753 pp., £3.95, February 1981, 0 330 26262 9
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The Narcissistic Text: A Reading of Camus’s Fiction 
by Brian Fitch.
Toronto, 128 pp., £12.25, April 1982, 0 8020 2426 2
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The Outsider 
by Albert Camus, translated by Joseph Laredo.
Hamish Hamilton, 96 pp., £5.95, April 1982, 0 241 10778 4
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... justice but I will defend my mother before justice.’ Even so judicious a critic as Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing 13 years later, saw fit to comment: ‘The defence of his mother required support for the French army’s pacification of Algeria.’ It was not so simple. In pre-war Algeria, Camus had long championed the Arab underdog. He believed in a ...

English Fame and Irish Writers

Brian Moore, 20 November 1980

Selected Poems 1956-1975 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 136 pp., £3.95, October 1980, 0 571 11644 2
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Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 224 pp., £7.95, October 1980, 0 571 11638 8
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... and Homeric has been a central preoccupation of modernist Irish writers: Yeats, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and, arguably, Beckett, have all made Iliads of local rows. Heaney, in a somewhat different manner, shares this preoccupation, as these Selected Poems, chosen by himself from the volumes of poetry he published before Field Work, attest. For when he ...

On Robert Silvers

Andrew O’Hagan: Remembering Robert Silvers, 20 April 2017

... or seeing literary history more panoramically, as he had a preference for doing. Conor Cruise O’Brien once explained to me how Irish writers first train their hopes on London before training them on New York. I’m not Irish and I’m not really at one with America, but I’ve always to some extent shared the romance of being a part of it in old New ...

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