I Get More out of Men - Colm Tóibín, 29 October 2009

“... When I was growing up in County Wexford the highest ambition you could have was to play hurling for your county. I remember being taken as a nine year old to watch my older brother play for Wexford in Croke Park in Dublin, which is the national stadium for Gaelic games. Even as I sat there watching my brother’s prowess, I knew that I would never match up to him, that I was a wimp and would always be one ...”

From The Blog - Missing the Point - Colm Toibin, 15 December 2009

“... From an early age, I have missed the point of things. I noticed this first when the entire class at school seemed to understand that Animal Farm was about something other than animals. I alone sat there believing otherwise. I simply couldn’t see who or what the book was about if not about farm animals. I had enjoyed it for that. Now, the teacher and every other boy seemed to think it was really about Stalin or Communism or something ...”

Short Cuts - Colm Tóibín: In Barcelona, 7 September 2017

“... Joan Miró,the Catalan painter, who was 82 when Franco died in 1975, had spent the previous 35 years in a sort of internal exile in Palma de Mallorca. Now that the dictator was dead, he was free to come to Barcelona as much as he wanted. He did a poster for the Barça football club; he designed record sleeves for young Catalan singers; he did the costumes for a young theatre group ...”

In LA - Colm Tóibín: LA on Fire, 23 January 2025

“... It was all sweetness verging on smugness. On the evening of Monday, 6 January we sat in the hot tub in the backyard and looked at the unfull moon. There were really only two small questions preoccupying me. Was that star actually Venus? And, also, was I wrong to feel slightly sad that the Christmas tree had finally been disentangled from its ornaments and was going into the garbage?In the night I noticed something banging in the wind, a door maybe, or a loose piece of fencing ...”

Insiderish - Colm Tóibín, 26 May 1994. Reviewing Profane Friendship by Harold Brodkey.

“... One of the early chapters in Harold Brodkey’s first novel The Runaway Soul is entitled ‘The River’. The narrator, after his father’s death, returns to a landscape which he had known in early childhood. Some of the prose is plain and clear: ‘At the mouth of the stream, where it emptied into the inlet, under willows, lay a very large, ungainly river dinghy ...”

The Built-in Reader - Colm Tóibín, 8 April 1993. Reviewing Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett, edited by Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier.

“... There is a moment in Samuel Beckett’s story ‘The Expelled’ in which the hero watches a funeral pass: Personally if I were reduced to making the sign of the cross I would set my heart on doing it right, nose, navel, left nipple, right nipple. But the way they did it, slovenly and wild, he seemed crucified all of a heap, no dignity, his knees under his chin and his hands anyhow ...”

Like Learning to Swim in Early Middle Age - Colm Tóibín, 20 April 1995. Reviewing Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview by Thom Gunn.

“... Fame is difficult for a writer to deal with,’ Thom Gunn writes in his essay on Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. ‘It dries you up, or it makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without ...”

Dissecting the Body - Colm Tóibín: Ian McEwan, 26 April 2007. Reviewing On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.

“... The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, announcing, ‘I have never been able to understand how that thing works,’ and then slowly realising all the magical tricks this little rubbery object could do when suitably inspired? (‘She grasped the animal under study without hesitation, turned it this way and that, observed it with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific, and said when she was finished: “How ugly it is, even uglier than a woman’s thing ...”

Diary - Colm Tóibín: In the Pyrenees, 6 January 1994.

“... Towards the end of November 1975 I was doing my shopping in the Boquería market off the Ramblas in Barcelona when I bumped into Bernard Loughlin, with whom I worked in an institution called the Dublin School of English. To mourn the passing of Generalissimo Franco on 20 November we had all been given ten days off. I had spent them in the city, wandering around in search of riots, old bars and potential sleeping partners ...”

How many nipples had Graham Greene? - Colm Tóibín, 9 Ju ne 1994

“... He received one hundred and eighty letters a month, he told one of his correspondents. Some of them were fan letters; others came from journalists who kept him informed about the places in the world which he cared about; academics wrote with lists of questions; publishers wrote looking for quotes for books they were about to publish. Authors wrote. In 1973 Greene wrote to Josef Skvorecky: ‘Your letters reach the length of a book by this time ...”

A House Full of No One - Colm Tóibín, 6 February 1997. Reviewing Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir by Mark Doty; Atlantis by Mark Doty; This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death by Harold Brodkey; PWA: Looking Aids in the Face by Oscar Moore.

“... The words ‘HIV Positive’ and ‘Aids’ do not appear in the poems in Mark Doty’s My Alexandria (1995); instead, they hover in the spaces between the other words, and they govern the tone of almost every poem. Now, with the appearance of Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir, we know that Doty’s boyfriend Wally Roberts was dying slowly from Aids when these poems were being written ...”

Diary - Colm Tóibín: Alone in Venice, 19 November 2020

“... Suddenly, there was nothing to complain about. No cruise ships went up the Giudecca Canal. There were no tourists clogging up the narrow streets. Piazza San Marco was often completely deserted. On some bridges a few gondoliers stood around, but there was no one to hire them. Instead, dogs and their owners walked the streets, with no one pushing them out of the way ...”

He’ll have brought it on Himself - Colm Tóibín, 22 May 1997. Reviewing Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing edited by Éibhear Walshe; Gooddbye to Catholic Ireland by Mary Kenny.

“... Sometime in the early sixties, when I was eight or nine, the actor Micheál MacLiammóir came to Enniscorthy, a small town in the south-east of Ireland where we lived, to perform his one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar. My uncle, who was a staunch member of Fianna Fáil, the ruling party, and a fervent member of the ruling church – he was later decorated by the Pope – bought us all tickets, and we attended, as did many others in the town, in a family group ...”

The Pope and Pachamama - Colm Tóibín, 22 May 2025

“... Steve Bannon doesn’t like him. Before the conclave, he named Cardinal Robert Prevost as ‘one of the dark horses’ to become the next pope. ‘Unfortunately, he’s one of the most progressive,’ Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either ...”

So much for shame - Colm Tóibín, 10 June 1993 Reviewing Haughey: His Life and Unlucky Deeds by Bruce Arnold.

“... My father was a supporter of the Fianna Fail Party. ‘You could salute Fine Gael people,’ he once told my sister – Fine Gael was the main opposition party – ‘but if you ever actually voted Fine Gael, your right hand would wither off.’ Throughout my childhood I believed that you could recognise a Fine Gael person merely by looking at him or her ...”

The Stubbornness of Lorenzo Lotto - Colm Tóibín: Lorenzo Lotto, 8 April 2010

“... Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice around 1483. He belonged to the same world, therefore, as Titian and Giorgione. Despite the fact that he was a native of the city, however, which they were not, he never became a fully fledged Venetian as they did. By 1503 his name is recorded in legal documents in Treviso as a painter; he also worked in the towns of Recanati and Jesi ...”

I was Mary Queen of Scots - Colm Tóibín: Biographical empathy, 21 October 2004. Reviewing My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots by John Guy; Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens by Jane Dunn.

“... Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel bows, as my mother did at the time ... I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane (less and less often as the years roll on ...”

The Playboy of West 29th Street - Colm Tóibín: Yeats’s Father in Exile, 25 January 2018

“... had heard one of the librarians telling someone on the phone in a half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a ...”

‘What is your nation if I may ask?’ - Colm Tóibín: Jews in Ireland, 30 September 1999. Reviewing Jews in 20th-century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust by Dermot Keogh.

“... In 1965, when Eamon de Valera was President of Ireland, the Irish Jewish community decided to honour him. They chose a site near Nazareth and planted a forest of ten thousand trees named after him. They also commissioned a book of Celtic symbols. They made effusive speeches in his praise in both Ireland and Israel. Jacob Herzog, the political director in the Prime Minister’s office, whose father had been Chief Rabbi in Ireland, wrote that Eamon de Valera’s leadership, integrity, deep humanity and sense of purpose have for many decades now left their imprint on the international community ...”

More a Voyeur - Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019. Reviewing Me by Elton John.

“... Elton John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music. From early on, Reg loved shopping and acquiring things ...”

New Ways of Killing Your Father - Colm Tóibín, 18 November 1993. Reviewing Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History by R.F. Foster.

“... In 1969, two years after my father died, my mother, my sisters and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new history of the 1798 Rising, The Year of Liberty by Thomas Pakenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where ‘our side’, the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say ‘facts’) about the Rising: how the English had muskets whereas we just had pikes, how the English poured boiling tar on the scalps of the Irish and then, when the tar had dried, peeled it off ...”

Playboys of the GPO - Colm Tóibín, 18 April 1996. Reviewing Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd.

“... The most important thing we have done is that we have made a modern art, taking our traditional art as a basis, adorning it with new material, solving contemporary problems with a national spirit,’ the Catalan architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch wrote in 1903. By the turn of the century, the national spirit had taken over most cultural activities in Catalonia, so that art, architecture and the Catalan language had become more powerful weapons in politics than resentment about Madrid’s handling of foreign or economic policy ...”

Ravishing - Colm Tóibín: Sex Lives of the Castrati, 8 October 2015. Reviewing The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds by Martha Feldman; Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani by Roger Freitas.

“... Balzac’s Sarrasine tells the story of a young woman’s wonder at the strange appeaman. First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnrance of an old man at a party in Paris. Balzac has tremendous fun describing the man.  First his clothes: he is wearing ‘a white waistcoat embroidered with gold’ and ‘a shirt-frill of English lace, yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied ...”

At St Peter’s - Colm Tóibín: The Dangers of a Priestly Education, 1 December 2005. Reviewing The Ferns Report by Francis Murphy, Helen Buckley and Laraine Joyce.

“... Everybody was afraid of Dr Sherwood. My mother was afraid of him at meetings of Pax Romana, the lay Catholic discussion group in Enniscorthy, our town, because he had a way of glaring at women members when they spoke. He didn’t, it seemed, like women speaking. At St Peter’s College, the seminary and boarding-school where I went at the age of 15 in 1970, he was dean of the seminary, but he had once been dean of discipline of the boarding-school, and had a fearsome reputation as a merciless wielder of the strap ...”

Rinse it in dead champagne - Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004. Reviewing War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry by Lindy Woodhead; Diana Vreeland by Eleanor Dwight.

“... The women who invented beauty came from far away. They lied about their ages and their origins and the source of their magic; their secrets were known only to certain chemists and secretaries and the maids and butlers who lived in fear of them, who survived long enough to tell and tell again the shocking truth, for example, that Elizabeth Arden, one of the world’s richest women, lined the inside of her shoes with newspaper, or that Helena Rubinstein’s lawyer chose ‘the budget option’ at the funeral parlour after her death until wiser counsel prevailed, or that Diana Vreeland’s hair was so hard that once, when her maid bumped into it with a tray, ‘it clinked ...”

How to be a wife - Colm Tóibín: The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy, 6 June 2002. Reviewing Janet & Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Jan Pottker; Mrs Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years by Barbara Leaming.

“... On 29 January 1884 Henry James noted a story which he had heard from Gertrude Tennant. It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust. ‘Yielding to family pressure,’ as James put it, ‘he offered his hand to a young, charming, innocent girl, the daughter of Lord Rosslyn ...”

The Wickedest Woman in Paris - Colm Tóibín, 6 September 2007. Reviewing Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett.

“... In listing Rupert Everett’s offences against decency, decorum and respect for his betters, it is hard to know where to start. For example, he is filled with pride over the telephone hoaxes which he – out of work and idle more often than not – in the company of a woman called Min Hogg, perpetrated against people who were, one presumes, rich and famous for very good reasons ...”

Urning - Colm Tóibín: The revolutionary Edward Carpenter, 29 January 2009. Reviewing Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham.

“... On or about December 1910,’ Virginia Woolf noted, ‘human character changed.’ It was hard in or about March 1977 in Barcelona not to feel that human character had changed again, or had changed back, or might change more. Franco was less than 18 months dead, and many of the sights and images in the city were puzzling. One day, as I stood watching a newly formed Communist group march by, I saw in the middle of the marchers a barman whom I had grown to love for his winning smile and general meekness ...”

On (Not) Saying What You Mean - Colm Tóibín, 30 November 1995

“... I came to live in Dublin when I was 17, in October 1972. It was very exciting. The annual fee for an arts student at University College Dublin was £100. Someone from home told me that he wandered into Theatre L one morning as Denis Donoghue was lecturing and noticed me staring at Donoghue with my mouth wide open, as though I was hearing an amazing piece of gossip for the first time ...”

A Priest in the Family - Colm Tóibín: A Story, 6 May 2004

“... She watched the sky darken, threatening rain. ‘There’s no light at all these days,’ she said. ‘It’s been the darkest winter. I hate the rain or the cold, but I don’t mind it at all when there’s no light.’ Father Greenwood sighed and glanced at the window. ‘Most people hate the winter,’ he said. She could think of nothing more to say and hoped that he might go now ...”

Why should you be the only ones that sin? - Colm Tóibín, 5 September 1996. Reviewing Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature by Anthony Heilbut; Thomas Mann: A Biography by Ronald Hayman; Thomas Mann: A Life by Donald Prater.

“... All his life he kept his distance. At readings and concerts he would notice a young man, gaze at him, make his presence felt and understood, and later, in the semi-privacy of his diaries, record the moment. On Sunday morning, 31 October 1920, for example, when he was still working on The Magic Mountain, he went with Katia, his wife, to an open rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis, a work which would figure in Doctor Faustus more than twenty years later ...”

Falling in love with Lucian - Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019. Reviewing The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 by William Feaver.

“... Lucian Freud’s mother, Lucie, brought her three sons from Berlin to London in September 1933 when Lucian was almost 11. She was soon followed by her husband, Ernst, an architect and the youngest son of Sigmund Freud. Over the next five or six years, more members of the family, including Sigmund himself, came to England, where their papers were organised by Marie Bonaparte, who put in a good word with the Duke of Kent ...”

A Man of No Mind - Colm Tóibín: The Passion of Roger Casement, 13 September 2012. Reviewing The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman.

“... In his book King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild describes the stretch of the Congo River as it approaches the sea: Much of the Congo River basin, we now know, lies on a plateau in the African interior. From the western rim of this plateau, nearly a thousand feet high, the river descends to sea level in a mere 220 miles. During this tumultuous descent, the river squeezes through narrow canyons, boils up in waves 40 feet high, and tumbles over 32 separate cataracts ...”

In His Pink Negligée - Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005. Reviewing The Complete Stories by Truman Capote; Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote edited by Gerald Clarke.

“... He was world-weary from the beginning. Nowhere was safe. Before he was 25 he declared New York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was ‘crooked’, London ‘a dreary place’. Even Paris, ‘a divine city’, could be ‘colder than a nun’s cunt’. Once he had passed the quarter century he hit on Rome: ‘a beautiful city, really – though inhabited by a quarrelsome and cynical race ...”

Arruginated - Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023. Reviewing Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.

“... On 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build ...”

The South - Colm Tóibín, 4 August 1994

One Art: The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Bishop: “... Even in the morning in that year the two-hour hotels were in bloom. The city was full of desire. It was hot. I stayed for a while in a narrow street near the Flamingo Park and went out some days to swim at Copacabana. It was that time between the death of Elizabeth Bishop and the appearance of the first biography and this volume of letters, when the ordinary reader on this side of the Atlantic knew very little about her ...”

A Whale of a Time - Colm Tóibín, 2 October 1997. Reviewing Roger Casement’s Diaries. 1910: The Black and the White edited by Roger Sawyer; The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement edited by Angus Mitchell.

“... Jessie Conrad remembered his visit: Sir Roger Casement, a fanatical Irish protestant, came to see us, remaining some two days our guest. He was a very handsome man with a thick, dark beard and piercing, restless eyes. His personality impressed me greatly. It was about the time when he was interested in bringing to light certain atrocities which were taking place in the Belgian Congo ...”

Snail Slow - Colm Tóibín: Letters to John McGahern, 27 January 2022. Reviewing The Letters of John McGahern edited by Frank Shovlin.

“... The first letter – five lines written to his father in April 1943 when John McGahern was eight years old – could take an entire book to gloss: Dear Daddy, Thanks very much for the pictures. I had great fun reading them. Come to see us soon. We got two goats. Uncle Pat does not like them. Will you bring over my bicycle please and games ...”

Mann v. Mann - Colm Tóibín: The Brother Problem, 3 November 2011. Reviewing House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles by Evelyn Juers.

“... The imposing house on Stockton Street in Princeton where Thomas Mann lived between 1938 and 1941 is these days owned by the Catholic Church. The main room is large enough for a congregation to assemble, and now contains pews and an altar. At either end of this room there are two beautiful smaller rooms with walls of glass, one made for summer light and the other designed for the winter ...”

The Art of Being Found Out - Colm Tóibín: The need to be revealed, 20 March 2008

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

Avoid the Orient - Colm Tóibín: The Ghastly Paul Bowles, 4 January 2007. Reviewing Paul Bowles: A Life by Virginia Spencer Carr.

“... Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed. In his first stories, for example, the natives are shining examples of naked otherness, created partly to refresh our view concerning the mixture of simplicity, guile and sexual beauty available in remote places. The white heroes, on the other hand, are neurotic and complex ...”

On Not Being Sylvia Plath - Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018. Reviewing Selected Poems by Thom Gunn.

“... There were two anthologies of modern poetry in our house when I was a teenager and they both offered glimpses of the world outside that were more intense, more useful, than anything on television or on albums or in ordinary books. One was The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. It had been published first in 1950, with a second edition in 1962 ...”

I haven’t been I - Colm Tóibín: The Real Fernando Pessoa, 12 August 2021. Reviewing Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith.

“... As he grew older, Fernando Pessoa became less visible, as though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows. The French translator and scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him ...”

Flann O’Brien’s Lies - Colm Tóibín, 5 January 2012

“... There were three cities; each of them had known a certain glory. In each of them, there was a sense that the glory was absent or ghostly, that the real world was elsewhere, that the cities in which there was excitement, or cultural completeness, or publishers and readers, were elsewhere. All three cities remained untouched by the Second World War; they were not bombed, nor were they transformed by reconstruction when the war ended ...”

My God, the Suburbs! - Colm Tóibín: John Cheever, 5 November 2009. Reviewing Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey.

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

Buy birthday present, go to morgue - Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017. Reviewing Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow; Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov by Alexander Nemerov.

“... The week before he was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ Taylor remembered, ‘and, without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors ...”

Seagulls as Playmates - Colm Tóibín: Where the Islanders Went, 20 February 2025. Reviewing Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce.

“... The statistics for the decline in people working on the land in Europe are stark. In Remembering Peasants, Patrick Joyce reports that in 1950 nearly half the population of Spain were agricultural workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was 23 per cent in 1950 and 3 per cent in 2019 ...”

Wobble in My Mind - Colm Tóibín: Lizzie, Cal and Caroline, 7 May 2020. Reviewing The Dolphin Letters, 1970-79: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle edited by Saskia Hamilton; The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-73 by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton.

“... In April 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls. He was considering an offer from the University of Essex that would have involved the family leaving New York for two years ...”

Gaelic Gloom - Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000. Reviewing Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist by Denis Sampson.

“... In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s first novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne gets to know her fellow boarders, especially the landlady’s brother, the returned Yank, Mr Madden. They discuss the difference between men and women in Ireland and America. ‘Guys beating their brains out to keep their wives in mink,’ Mr Madden complains ...”

Putting Religion in Its Place - Colm Tóibín: Marilynne Robinson, 23 October 2014. Reviewing Lila by Marilynne Robinson.

“... Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one. The tone was mild and tolerant, and although it was filled with uncertainty, there was a convincing veneer of pure certainty about the main matter, which is that churches are left-over things, belonging to the sweet foolishness of the past ...”

Who to Be - Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009. Reviewing The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’ Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

The Importance of Aunts - Colm Tóibín, 17 March 2011

“... In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with life. ‘She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more – just a little longer.’ James also had in mind a young man who ‘wishes he could make her taste of happiness, give her something that it breaks her heart to go without having known ...”

Places Never Explained - Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013. Reviewing The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht edited by Jonathan Post.

“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”

Notes from the Land of the Dead - Colm Tóibín: Art and Politics in Catalonia, 20 March 2014. Reviewing A Personal Memoir: Fragments for an Autobiography by Antoni Tàpies, translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer; Complete Writings Volume II: Collected Essays by Antoni Tàpies, translated by Josep Miquel Sobrer.

“... Antoni Tàpies’s monument to Picasso was commissioned by Barcelona City Council. It sits on the edge of Parc de la Ciutadella on the busy, dusty downtown street named for Picasso. It has a more mysterious and shadowy presence than any other piece of modern public sculpture in Barcelona, such as Chillida’s stark, severe piece of cast-iron in Plaça del Rei, or Lichtenstein’s colourful, brash, cartoon-like sculpture close to the waterfront, or Subirachs’s literal-minded and awkward-looking monument to President Macià in Plaça de Catalunya, or Botero’s silly cat on Rambla del Raval, or some of the other more playful adornments on the beach in Barceloneta, Frank Gehry’s fish among them ...”

Among the Flutterers - Colm Tóibín: The Pope Wears Prada, 19 August 2010. Reviewing The Pope Is Not Gay by Angelo Quattrocchi, translated by Romy Clark Giuliani.

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

A Man with My Trouble - Colm Tóibín: Henry James leaves home, 3 January 2008. Reviewing The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume I edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume II edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

His Spittin’ Image - Colm Tóibín: John Stanislaus Joyce, 22 February 2018

“... A father is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died ...”

Open in a Scream - Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021. Reviewing Francis Bacon: Revelations by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.

“... The period in Francis Bacon’s life between 1933 and 1944 remains a mystery. We know who he was seeing and where he was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation ...”

Instead of shaking all over, I read the newspapers. I listened to the radio. I had my lunch - Colm Tóibín: ‘It’s curable,’ he said, 18 April 2019

“... It all started with my balls. I was in Southern California and my right ball was slightly sore. At the beginning I thought the pain might be caused by the heavy keys in the right hand pocket of my trousers banging against my testicle as I walked along the street. So I moved the keys into my jacket pocket. The pain stayed for a while and then it went away and then it came back ...”

After I am hanged my portrait will be interesting - Colm Tóibín, 31 March 2016

“... been turned to stone ... but the sound of that key in that lock has haunted me ever since.’Watch Colm Tóibín discussing his ...”

Roaming the Greenwood - Colm Tóibín, 21 January 1999. . Reviewing A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods.

“... In his essay ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Borges wrote that the Argentine writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and close at the same time, had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He went on to explore the extraordinary contribution of the Jewish artist to Western culture and of the Irish writer to English literature ...”

The Last Witness - Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

“... On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell ...”

On Some Days of the Week - Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012. Reviewing Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle; The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.

“... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...”

Follow-the-Leader - Colm Tóibín: Bishop v. Lowell, 14 May 2009. Reviewing Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.

“... Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been sunny between us ...”

A Djinn speaks - Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003. Reviewing Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats by Ann Saddlemyer.

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care ... She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

My Darlings - Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

“... There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live in the city and the greater the stray memories and associations you build up. Sometimes this sense of the city can be greatly added to by history and by books; sometimes, however, the past – I mean the distant past – and the books hardly matter, seem a strange irrelevance ...”

The Road to Reading Gaol - Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

“... In October 2016, three years after it was closed, I went to Reading Gaol. The prison had been laid out in 1844, each floor cruciform, so that all four corridors could be seen from a single, central vantage point. In cell after cell where, most recently, young offenders had been held, there was a set of metal bunk beds riveted to the wall, with a small table and two stools opposite, and a metal sink close to the small window, high in the wall across from the door, and a toilet on the other side of a small partition ...”

Loafing with the Sissies - Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020. Reviewing Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik.

“... Andy Warhol in 1955 ‘Overlooked No More’ is the title of an occasional series in the obituaries section of the New York Times that prints obituaries of those – mainly women but also African Americans and homosexuals – who were ignored by the paper at the time of their deaths. Since the Times was launched in 1851, the omissions go back a long way ...”

I Could Sleep with All of Them - Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008. Reviewing In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story by Andrea Weiss.

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over ...”

Issues of Truth and Invention - Colm Tóibín: Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, 4 January 2001. Reviewing The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart edited by Brendan Barrington.

“... In March 1992 I received a printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed. I wondered if it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the invitation was a direct provocation ...”

The Bergoglio Smile - Colm Tóibín: The Francis Papacy, 21 January 2021

“... The trial of Argentina’s military leaders took place in Buenos Aires between April and September 1985. The court heard evidence against the nine most senior figures in the regime, including three former presidents – Videla, Viola and Galtieri. Sittings began each day in the early afternoon and often went on until after midnight. The first official inquiry into the extent of torture and disappearances in Argentina, called CONADEP, had been set up by Raúl Alfonsín in December 1983 shortly after his election as president ...”

Erasures – Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

“... The house at Coole has gone now; razed to the ground. ‘They came like swallows and like swallows went,’ Yeats said in ‘Coole Park, 1929’, imagining a timeWhen all those rooms and passages are gone,When nettles wave upon a shapeless moundAnd saplings root among the broken stone.Nothing now roots among the broken stone: the site where the house once stood is cemented over, as though to contain uneasy spirits in the foundations ...”

Love in a Dark Time - Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001. Reviewing The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.

“... The first two months of 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love ...”

Don’t abandon me - Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006. Reviewing Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson.

“... On 9 March 1951, Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one – one of phoney sophistication ...”

[See also many listed in which he is referred to under the same listing.]