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Conor Cruise O'Brien's majestic meditation on the life and writings of Burke was originally published in 1992.

'O'Brien had] been brooding on Edmund Burke for decades. First he worked on a narrative approach and came to a standstill, he knew not why. Then, in the light of much painful observation of the world and its wickedness, he turned to a thematic treatment, inspired by Yeats's elliptic lines: "American colonies, Ireland, France and India / Harried, and Burke's great melody against it." "It," he decided, was the abuse of power.' Paul Johnson, "Independent on Sunday"

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"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 York University from 1965-9, and there teaching students in whom he noted burning radical convictions but also a disconcerting 'lack of suspicion in those bright, young eyes'. Whereas to O'Brien's mind the 'suspecting glance' was a mark of political maturity that had to be first directed at one's...

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'Brien not only denounces IRA terrorism, as you would expect from a mainstream politician, but - in a sense quite different from the rationalisations offered by ideological apologists for political violence - seeks to understand it. I mean, "really "understand it - not extenuate it by...

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 Devonshire thirty years ago. Nobody who tries to write about either of those subjects, or about "the bloody crossroads" where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser.' Christopher Hitchens, "London Review of Books"

'When a liberal can write such pieces as "Mercy 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, O'Brien set himself to a study of 'the patterns of several exceptionally vivid imaginations which are permeated by Catholicism' - from Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh to Francois Mauriac and Paul Claudel - and to analyse 'what those patterns might share'. The originality and flair of "Maria...

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.' Marghanita Laski, "The Times"

' "Camus"] displays O'Brien's cultivated intelligence at its most joyous pitch, and . . . demonstrates his unique critical talent . . . O'Brien] demonstrates that Camus was far from being an exemplar of the truly independent intellectual and that his...