Word: dublins
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...shrewd compromise between truth and the blander stuff that makes agreeable popular entertainment. The man himself was a crusty, anticlerical Communist, scarcely the image of a conventional movie hero, though he also happened to be one of the grandest playwrights of the 20th century. Cassidy, filmed in and around Dublin with a wholehearted feel for the gritty poetry of the slums where the author lived and worked at the time of the Troubles, cuts O'Casey down to swallowable size...
...history is only the background for O'Casey's warm, humorous, pathetic characters. Nora and Jack Clitheroe share a Dublin tenement apartment with Peter Flynn, Nora's uncle, and Covey, Jack's cousin. Covey, an international socialist, mocks old Peter, a die-hard Irish nationalist, while Nora attempts to pacify them both. But she cannot control her husband's allegiance to the Citizen Army. He leaves her and dies in the battle...
Singular Ginger. The novelist who is most truly black and funny about sex and death is James Patrick ("Mike") Donleavy, 42, who was born in Brooklyn, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and now divides his time between London and the Isle of Man. Donleavy succeeds better than any of the others in combining the age-old immediacy of priapic comedy with an excruciatingly contemporary sense of human absurdity. He might best be described as a uniquely modern Aristophanist with an existential horror of death...
...once the bubble burst. When Queen Anne died, the Tories were summarily turned out of office. Swift was lucky to be left with a dreary benefice in Dublin, the deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The shock permanently damaged his mind. All his nightmares of rejection recurred: he suffered fugues of persecution in which delusory daggers and imaginary nooses pursued him. "I am left to die," he wailed, "like a poisoned rat in a hole...
Gigantic Tantrum. The last half of Swift's life has been aptly described as a "gigantic tantrum." His Luciferian will to power raged in tiny Dublin like a demon in a bottle. "I have determined," he bellowed, "to have no one about me I that denies my authority!" He gave way I to continual diatribes. The young women of quality who came to him for instruction were pinched for discipline till their arms turned black and blue. And when there was nobody there to torture, the demonic dean relieved the pressure of his passions by running rapidly and repeatedly...