novelists-from-ireland

"For power and place men may intrigue; but in order to have influence they must more or less deserve it. Power may, at certain times, in all countries perhaps, be acquired by favor; but influence is surely the result of public opinion and of general consideration."

"You have to walk to get to know a city; it was then — in the Dublin of the 1940s — that I first discovered that. was a staid row of unlicensed hotels, politely elbowing one another for attention; was famous for its sausage shop. The set the tone for , and Charlemont Street offered a display of s, extracted from the footsore: The Walker's Friend, a notice said. and Lad Lane and Lady Lane, Ebenezer Terrace and Morning Star Road: all of them had an echo of a lost significance."

"... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship."

"Trevor is not a benign . There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite (which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here) for seedy criminals, s, and s. In this volume, some tame s have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of s to get himself a driver and a free meal."

"... I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. “Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?” a headmaster asked me once. “And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?” I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children."

"Trevor won many honors, including the of the for “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories”; the Prize for literature and the for fiction in 1976; and the three times: in 1978 for “,” in 1983 for “Fools of Fortune” and in 1994 for “.” The latter was made into a 1999 film starring ."

"... He drew us into the lives of English and Irish s and s, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time."

"This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness."

"I find it hard to picture some scrubbed-up stranger wielding my naked, squawking self about as though I were a broiled ham. Instead I like to pretend I was born all alone without any fuss, without any gore. And right here, in my father’s house. I like to believe the house itself gave birth to me, that I slithered down the chimney, fell ignobly into the fire grate and inhaled my first breath of cold, swirling ash."

"Everything he’s learned is from second-hand sources, as opposed to actually being around people and talking to them. He’s a strange man. And we see them all the time. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with their minds other than they’ve just been formed in a certain way."

"We lived mostly on the dole then, with a handful of crappy part-time jobs in-between, for five years, and it was during those years that both my novels were written. It was a hard, bleak period but it was also very simple and joyful at times, and I’m so grateful for that now. It sounds perhaps strange to say but if it wasn’t for the recession and all the opportunities that it removed from my life I doubt if I’d have felt the freedom, and perhaps also the despair, to pursue my writing."

"The Celtic Tiger definitely hurt Ireland from an ecological point of view – and on a societal level it brought out a nasty side of people’s nature, which impacted on the environment in turn – an obsession with property, and with ownership and one upmanship, with wealth and appearances."

"Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds."

"The panorama from the tip of the peninsula included a rock island a mile offshore. It was no more than a knoll but lofty and jagged, marked by a beam of light in the bottom centre — a gap that the dropping sun, on cloudless days, gleamed clear through — and on the through-gleaming days, they marvelled at the visible presence of the archway, at the brilliance of the absence at the rock knoll’s heart. If it wasn’t for the island, Sigh said, you wouldn’t even know there was a hole."

"I'm looking at the natural world all the time and trying to remind myself of how precious it is, it's still there, and these cycles are still going on. Because I think in ten or twenty years they won't be, things will be very different[.]"

"I was born in a place I am not from and raised in a place I am not from and now I choose to live in a different place I am not from, and so in my writing I keep circling around this idea of how to be at home in a landscape as opposed to a community or, for that matter, a society or a nation."

"A robin had claimed ownership of the fuchsia hedge that ran half the length of the east side of the driveway. It scaled the apical branch each dawn, and no matter the severity of the wind, it gripped on with its claws and trilled a melodious warning song — a beautiful, convoluted ballad about the murderous vengeance that would be exacted upon any bird who dared to trespass. The robin of the driveway had murdered in the past. It was prepared for murder."

"The clever rabbits understood that stillness was the simplest form of subterfuge. The stupid rabbits took off. On the undersides of their tails, white handkerchiefs of surrender had been pinned in order to betray them."

"I have always known I’ll never have kids, and I’m lucky to be with a man who feels the same. And I don’t mind talking about it. I know that you sacrifice a great deal of joy as well if you have kids. Obviously having kids would bring happiness too. So it’s a balancing act between all those things."

"I had an image of all language standing to attention, eager to serve this writer."

"Oxford alumna Alice Winn, who studied English Literature at , may have published just one novel so far, but it is one hell of a debut. Since its appearance in 2023, In Memoriam has met with widespread acclaim and been lauded with prizes – and with good cause. It’s a genuinely compulsive page-turner, a sweeping historical tragedy and an intimate love story all rolled into one, exactly the kind of book that plays on your mind for a long time afterwards. Following a forbidden love between two soldiers in the First World War, you can imagine the acute sense of heartache that runs throughout."

"Usually, when you read war literature, they’re trying to present what they went through to someone who wasn’t there."

"I find it interesting that most of the was written by officers. The same is not true in France and Germany. I can’t imagine that British privates wrote less — I wonder if they were simply published less? The best piece of writing I read from the perspective of a British private was ’ ', but it is abstract and more beautiful than useful, from a research perspective."

"In the UK world war one is a selling point; in the US it's more an obstacle. In the UK we live in the fossilised wreckage of world war one; a lot of people see it as a turning point for the empire and it looms larger in the consciousness."

"And still I like to fancy that, Somewhere beyond the Styx’s bound, Sir Guy’s tall phantom stoops to pat His little phantom hound!"

"The wind's in the east, But there's green on the larch, And a fairy-tale beast On the uplands' wide arch That gallops and gallops, light pacing, At chasing Of Magic, clean Magic of March."

"I am afraid that this bald summary may create the impression that the book is simply a Socialist tract, a flagrant instance, that is to say, of the appropriation of a specific form of literary activity for the purposes of propaganda. That would be grossly unfair to the author and his work, which is not a treatise, but a pungent, intimate, scaring and profoundly realistic study of the lives, the environment, the opinions and outlook of the working-classes. The book does not step beyond the building trade, of which Tressall obviously possessed a meticulous knowledge, but the portrait of the builders is the portrait in miniature of the English working-classes. And the last thing in the world that Tressall did was to idealise them. The book is in fact a fierce, almost a savage attack upon their apathy, their shoddiness, their servility, their hopeless inadequacy to emancipate themselves from their wretched conditions, their willingness to perpetuate a system which degrades their class as a whole to the level of beasts of burden. And with what extraordinary insight and power of presenting and individualising his characters he does it! He simply lets them speak for themselves, as, at the dinner hour, they discuss politics, unemployment and poverty. There is no extenuation, no compromise, no romancing. These men are not abstractions or personifications of their creator's ideals or antipathies. They are the living human material of to-day, so debased by the squalor, futility, waste and despair of their lives, that they will ridicule any effort to make new and finer ones."

"The proletarian life which is described in the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—the most authentic novel ever written about British workers—is the same that George Lansbury knew in Poplar. The Mugsborough builders were half-starved, swindled by their employers and by the authorities, the prey of charity-mongers, narks and even their fellow-workers, corrupted and brutalised by the conditions of Edwardian employment."

"Tressell's statement in his preface to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that his book "is not a treatise or essay, but a novel", the main object being "to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happiness of everyday life", represents nothing less than an aesthetic revolution in the proletarian-revolutionary novel."

"I fear that if I say what I think it may appear extravagant; while if I moderate my words I shall feel that I am doing scant justice to what has seemed to me the most remarkable human document that has appeared in my time. It is a masterpiece of realism. The work of a craftsman, it is true, unerring and pitiless in its delineation of men and life. Were Zola and Tolstoi living, I am sure they would look upon this common house-painter with envy, as one whose novice hand had outdone them. I am sure that Gorky and Jack London would confess frankly that the work of Robert Tressall surpasses theirs. Certainly, London's The Call of the Wild cannot be as true to life as these ragged philanthropists."

"I'm reading Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists for the umpteenth time. And not just because I am going to record it as an audiobook. It was the first novel to encourage me in the working-class fight. It's an encapsulation of what's endemic in capitalism and the nobility of struggle for socialism."

"Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, one of the most moving stories ever told of the plight of the working class in Britain."

"What we call civilisation—the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers—is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. It is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist to-day, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. Every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or dull, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind, no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal—he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before."

"Almost the last book he Hubert Parry] read, in August 1918, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, which greatly moved and impressed him."

"What I actually lent him was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. This is the one work of genius which Socialism has produced, and about which our Tory press, well-bred and aloof when it suits them, has maintained a conspiracy of silence. It represents Capital as putting its foot on the face of Labour, and stabbing it in the guts to make sure. It is by a house-painter who made a first-hand indictment of the state of affairs on the lowest rung of the ladder, and died. It is quite unanswerable, and for that reason has never been answered."

"The book [The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists] is a realistic description of the building trade in the early years of this century and a powerful exposition of socialist ideas, written by a working-man, Bob Noonan, under the pen-name of Robert Tressell. In my youth it was passed from hand to hand among people in the Labour movement and had a remarkable effect on our thinking."

"I read Jack London and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Those were the books that formed my political opinions."

"If the book is not for the squeamish, it is not for the tender-hearted either. From an artistic standpoint or view, the absence of sentimentality is one of the most admirable features, but those who are accustomed to have their literature of poverty and misfortune sugared with pity and sentiment will find this unadorned veracity repulsive. The book must therefore depress and then outrage our comfortable classes. We are not accustomed to see the life of the workingman from his own point of view. Our literature is carefully insulated from the economic interpretation of life, with its sense of the bestial struggle for existence and its slow and interminable fight against filth and disease. It must make our comfortable class uneasy to see the whole remorseless mechanism of shoddy capitalism so unsparingly revealed, and to see men so palpably the victims of economic forces. Even the most woolen-headed of our reactionaries can hardly fail to feel the ironic sting of the phrase, "ragged-trousered philanthropists." Such a story is a scathing critique of the whole of British civilization, and incidentally of our own individualistic and plutocratic democracy. He must indeed be a tough Englishman who can eat a good dinner after finishing it."

"I have been an English artisan, engaged in the building trades, too, and I know that the book does not exaggerate in the least."

"The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life as its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties."

"I remember one in particular whose title, because it looked so strange and terrifying, nearly gave me nightmares just to look at it. It was called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's strange that when I did come to read it, much later in life, it knocked me sideways. I've never read a book, before or since, which made such a profound impression on me, and I still think it's one of the greatest books that's ever been written."

"Those who wish to live in imagination through the daily round of the unorganised worker and the casual labourer, to share its racking anxieties, its bitter humiliations, its joyless excitements, should turn from statistics and sociological generalisations to the poignant self-revelation of one of their own members. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, house-painter and sign-writer, is not only a precise and careful record, written with a realism and a firmness of touch that are almost French, of a certain section of working-class life, but it also enables the thinking reader to form some conception of the immense revolution which the war must have caused in thousands of working class minds and households."

"There is the most remarkable of all books about working-class life, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It too is written from the inside — "Hell, by One of the Damned". Like Jack London's work, it has been immensely popular among working men. Its failing is that Tressell was not a writer; he did not know how to select, to do away with the superfluous and make his material work to its best effect."

"This novel ought to be read by all social reformers, and even more so by those who cannot be so classed."

"Tressell's artful depiction of the sheer physical privation and terror of what it is like to work too long, too hard, with too little food in your stomach will bring a chill to the heart of anyone who has ever been in a remotely similar situation. In such a setting we might expect to see a group of sub-human automatons stumbling about “the Cave.” Such a presentation would meet current artistic standards and we might pass them on the street with just such thoughts. Tressell knows better. He knows his men from the inside. Novels live or die by the amount of life in the people in them. Tressell's housepainters are as rich and juicily human a collection of people as has been seen in an English novel since the days of Charles Dickens."

"The best British working-class novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists."

"The bitterness of mood in which such a book must have been written by a man who saw so intelligently the stupidities of the life around him and yet was completely unable to find any other milieu, produces fierce touches of satire. But like all good satire, its exaggerations are really searing truths. Neither his irony, nor his bitterness blinded the writer to seeing the world as it really was. That the book is veracious in atmosphere and expression, no one who has seen the deplorable frowziness of English proletarian life, or tasted that peculiar quality which makes British squalor the filthiest in the world, can doubt. This is no book for the squeamish. And yet the coarseness of British working-class life is sketched in broad strokes and outlines, rather than plastered on the canvas in the manner of a Zola; and there is a British silence as to sexuality."

"My favourite book, which I buy and give away quite often, is The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, a pseudonym for a fella called Robert Noonan. The book is about the building trade at the turn of the century and is a classic... In this book he tells the story of a group of artisans and their struggle against low wages and appalling working conditions. It is a really vivid portrayal of the contradictions of capitalism. When I was in Leicester prison in 1974 following the builders' strike during which I led the pickets, the governor of the prison, who was once a bricklayer, asked me if I had read it and when I said no, gave it to me. I have always had a copy since."

"It was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got on to paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilised stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before."

"It was at the turn of the century that Robert Tressall, a house-painter, wrote the story of working-class life which he called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Since that time much paint has been spilled and grumbled over. But Tressall's evocation of the talk of a gang of Cockney workers is as intimate, as amusing—and as touching—as it was then. Nor has there been anything else quite like it, though perhaps Mr. Maugham came nearest in some passages of Liza of Lambeth."