"Denis Donoghue has been a key figure in Irish studies and an important public intellectual in Ireland, the UK and US throughout his career. These essays represent the best of his writing and operate in conversation with one another. He probes the questions of Irish national and cultural identity that underlie the finest achievements of Irish writing in all genres. Together, the essays form an unusually lively and far-reaching study of three crucial...

"The words of its writers are part of the texture of Dublin, an invisible counterpart to the bricks and pavement we see around us. Beyond the ever- present footsteps of James Joyce's characters, Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus, around the city centre, an ordinary-looking residential street overlooking Dublin Bay, for instance, presents the house where Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney lived for many years; a few blocks away is the house where another...