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“... more so when we know that they would have been recognised as the extremities of the skeleton of ‘Charles O’Brien’, the Irish Giant. O’Brien’s skeleton was one of Hunter’s most famous specimens. From the first, there were dark stories about how it was obtained. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, bodies had to be ...”

“... expression and modernism.’ There was, rather, a continuum of architecture and sculpture. In 1931 Charles Reilly, sometime head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, published Representative British Architects of the Present Day, which, Stamp notes, ‘is representative of the period by being so very unrepresentative’. He ascribes the conspicuous absence ...”

“... history of the antebellum South, much less become a historian of Southern intellectuals? Michael O’Brien has been working on an answer to these questions for fifteen years, and the result is a massive refutation of received wisdom. His first task is to persuade a sceptical audience of the mere existence of Southern intellectual life between 1810 and ...”

“... Conor Cruise O’Brien’s majestic study takes rise from two lines of Yeats: American colonies, Ireland, France and India Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it. The problem is how to use the first line to answer two questions: how did the ‘great melody’ come to be uttered; and what exactly was ‘it’? Yeats answered the latter: Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard’s eye ...”

“... wider social and cultural contexts – education acts, decolonisation, immigration – while Sean O’Brien, author of The Deregulated Muse, a fine critical panorama of contemporary poetry, commends ‘the emergence of new poetries from formerly unsuspected sources’. There is also a step towards devolution, with Armitage and Crawford including a more than ...”

“... drama and the Famine horrors as a ‘more important consideration’ than ‘being wholly fair to Charles Trevelyan and the British Treasury’, and this leaves the historian with a number of quibbles – in particular, the leading role assigned to Michael Collins in all the events of 1919-22. Yet on fundamental interpretation Kee is less dogmatic and, above ...”

“... are weakened by the author’s insistence on maintaining an argument with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s article of 1965, ‘Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.B. Yeats’. Dr O’Brien was not the only commentator to have called Yeats a Fascist; nor was he the most persuasive. Dr Cullingford’s ...”

“... Two of the three authors who preface the reprints endorse this lofty estimate. Conor Cruise O’Brien, in his Foreword to The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, which Malraux wrote during World War Two, declares: ‘The author was probably imagining, in historical retrospect, a happier future time, after the fall of Hitler, when it would again be possible for ...”

“... this case, is life and death. The first sequence represents the numbers played every week by Tim O’Brien and Steve Sumner until O’Brien’s death last June. The second sequence is the one that came up the night before he died. O’Brien had forgotten to renew his ticket ...”

“... us to his own ghosts. Two, former British war photographer Tim Page and former American grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and understanding, a search for the ...”

“... on translation work – Henri Charrière’s Papillon, various books by Beauvoir, a biography of Charles de Gaulle – as he plugged away at the series, now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for ...”

“... Land, the Cantos, Williams’s Paterson and Bunting’s Briggflatts were Louis Zukofsky’s A, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsbert’s Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... this subliminal vision can hardly be overstated. It creates the view of partition, as Conor Cruise O’Brien put it, not just as ‘a wrong’ but as ‘wrong’. This simple fact helps to explain how the persistent failure of nationalists to build bridges to the North has been paralleled by their uncanny success in ‘eliciting the siege reflex’ – by ...”

“... in the Bell, a periodical edited by Sean O’Faolain, and in the pages of the Irish Times. Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices was banned in 1941, on the basis of the single sentence: ‘She saw Etienne and her father in the embrace of love.’ She was the only Irish writer to appeal the board’s decision – a fact that showed either collective ...”