C.C.O’Brien’s extremely provocative and prolific literary criticism has been edited into a well organized study emphasizing the various writers and genres that have fascinated this great Irish statesman and writer. With notes and extensive introduction by Professor Skelly. This work is very useful(and revealing) of the currents in midcentury Irish and British writing and is particularly revealing discussing the origins of the new Irish literary renaissance in poetry and theatre that has emerged in the last two decades. Discusses Yeats, Joyce, O’Connell, Dublin as a literary center, censorship, Murphy, Bell, Fallon ,Heaney and others.