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The GatekeeperEditions
Review
In places I laughed out loud, and more often than you can usually expect in a short book: Eagleton’s account of his political activities with his comrades, and of some of the terrible behaviour of his fellow academics is truly hilarious. All students of politics should read it – and lighten up. - review by Dan Fenton |
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John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Were it not for the strong recommendation of two highly respected and valued customers (you’re all in that camp, of course you are), I wouldn’t have read this book, a short memoir by a man who grew up in poverty-stricken Salford and won a place at Cambridge. Not that I share HRH Prince Charles’ reported view of the author as ‘dreadful’, which is teasingly reprinted on the book’s jacket, but I must confess that I had never imagined that a Marxist – especially one teaching English literature at Oxford – would have such a self-deprecating sense of humour. But then, you see, years ago a good friend (who by the way is still a good friend) had presented me with the memoirs (amazingly, now out of print) of one Andrei Gromyko. Some of you will remember him: he was Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union for about two hundred years, and he actually concluded his book by saying that he had tried, in writing his memoirs – I paraphrase, but I swear this is in it – to given an objective account of the events which he described, in other words, as always, he had adhered to the principles of Marxist-Leninism. This, then, is the ideological baggage which I have carried for so long – until now.
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