Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1111715 in Books
• Published on: 1998
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The life and adventures of Conor Cruise O'Brien would be interesting even were he not such an intelligent writer. He spent his childhood in the shadow of the Easter Rising, torn between those relatives passionately committed to the Irish Revolution and those whose loyalties had led them to fight for the British Crown in France. He was the United Nations' man on the spot in the Congo and Katanga, and has much to say about the murders of Lumumba and Hammarskjold. His adventures in Irish politics and British journalism, his fight for academic freedom in Ghana and his intellectual campaign against terrorism--all these are interesting stories memorably, if self-servingly, told.

Of course, obsessional self-vindication is often an unsatisfactory trait in autobiographers, but not when leavened with an equally habitual love of gossip and good lines. This is a life to which ideas and language have been important; there is a remorseless logic to O'Brien's wanderings from Left to Right, and to his attempt to persuade Northern Unionists to sign up with the Irish Republic in order to stitch up Sinn Fein. If at times the reader worries about O'Brien's good sense, his intelligence is always on pyrotechnic display. --Roz Kaveney