July 1960: The newly independent Congo is hit by the secession of its mineral rich-province Katanga, led by Moïse Tshombe and backed by Belgium and Britain.June 1961: Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien arrives in Katanga as Special Representative of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, his task (...

Owen Sheehy Skeffington was one of the few Irish public figures who carried a flame for individual conscience and humanitarianism during the mid century. He came from a socialist-republican backround (his father, Francis, a pacifist, murdered in 1916; his mother, Hanna, a prominent suffragette), and...

The first literary phase in the brilliant and protean career of Conor Cruise O'Brien was his work as critic for Dublin literary magazine The Bell, which begat this collection of essays first published in 1952 (under the pseudonym 'Donat O'Donnell', as O'Brien was then a working civil servant.) In it...

Conor Cruise O'Brien's brilliant and hugely controversial 1965 essay on the political convictions of W. B. Yeats is the title-piece for this superb 1988 collection of pieces on politics, religion, nationalism and terrorism.'O'Brien is a man of strong views, and he writes with verve and wit. Agree wi...

The Suspecting Glance (first published in 1972) collects Conor Cruise O'Brien's four T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures as delivered at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in November 1969. The lectures were inspired by O'Brien's experience of holding the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities at New ...

In Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (first published in 1978) Conor Cruise O'Brien collects a number of essays alongside three short plays that dramatise political arguments through the infamous figure of the Roman king of Judaea for whom the collection is named.'A great book. In it, O'B...

Written in 1972 in the wake of Bloody Sunday and direct rule, States of Ireland was Conor Cruise O'Brien's searching analysis of contemporary Irish nationalism: part-memoir, part-history, part-polemic.'If The Great Melody (1992) is O'Brien's major academic work, States of Ireland is the one that wil...

Conor Cruise O'Brien's penetrative reading of Albert Camus, Nobel laureate and author of L'Etranger and La Peste, was originally published in 1970.'O'Brien's Camus is brilliant. While having been himself profoundly moved by Camus's work, he asks why students have so often misinterpreted him.' Margha...

Arguably Conor Cruise O'Brien's most influential and admired book was this brilliant collection of essays - on history, literature and public affairs - first published in 1965.'I can still remember the excitement with which I discovered a copy of Writers and Politics, in a provincial library in Devo...