Overview

Often scathingly funny, frequently tender, and always completely engaging, The Gatekeeper is Terry Eagleton's memoirs, his deep-etched portraits of those who influenced him, either by example or by contrast: his father, headmasters, priests, and Cambridge dons. He was a shy, bookish, asthmatic boy keenly aware of social inferiority yet determined to make his intellectual way. The Gatekeeper mixes the soberly serious with the downright hilarious, skewer-sharp satire with unashamed fondness, the personal with the political. Most of it all it reveals a young man learning to reconcile oppositions: a double-edged portrait of the intellectual as a young man.

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Reviews

[A] hilarious and devastating little book. <br>-- The New York Times Book Review <br> Eagleton cracks jokes as easily as one would crack peanut shells. <br>-- Washington Post Book World <br> Witty and entertaining...heady, brimming with blistering screeds against the sacred and the profane. <br>-- Entertainment Weekly <br> This superb memoir, which is riotously funny, philosophically illuminating, and raucously satirical, is so filled with good writing that you want to turn immediately to a friend and read whole swatches out loud....Eagleton's style dazzles, illuminates, and connects. <br>-- Providence Journal <br> Ireland has always provided England with some of its greatest wits. Past ages have seen Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde illuminating English letters; for the last several decades, Oxford, at least, has had Terry Eagleton...A very funny book, with wet-your-pants-laughing passages. <br>-- Booklist (starred and boxed review) <br> In this entertaining memoir of his childhoo

[A] hilarious and devastating little book. -- The New York Times Book Review Eagleton cracks jokes as easily as one would crack peanut shells. -- Washington Post Book World Witty and entertaining...heady, brimming with blistering screeds against the sacred and the profane. -- Entertainment Weekly This superb memoir, which is riotously funny, philosophically illuminating, and raucously satirical, is so filled with good writing that you want to turn immediately to a friend and read whole swatches out loud....Eagleton's style dazzles, illuminates, and connects. -- Providence Journal Ireland has always provided England with some of its greatest wits. Past ages have seen Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde illuminating English letters; for the last several decades, Oxford, at least, has had Terry Eagleton...A very funny book, with wet-your-pants-laughing passages. -- Booklist (starred and boxed review) In this entertaining memoir of his childhood and intellectual development, Eagleton lives up to both sides of his reputation, coming off as both an astute social critic and a sharp-tongued cad. -- Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Terry Eagleton is the author of, among other books, Literary Theory and The Truth About the Irish. He has also written a novel, several plays, and the screenplay for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein. He has been Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford, and Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and is currently Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University.

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