Description
‘The breadth of Butler’s interests and concerns is remarkable, even for a writer whose career spanned the greater part of a tumultuous century …whether he is writing about wartime atrocities or local history, the slaughter of the Jews or Celtic hagiography, he speaks with authenticity. In this he is a member of a dying species.’ John Banville ‘Like Milosz from Poland or Holub from Czechoslovakia, Butler is a true cosmopolitan, and his writing has something of their unruffled astringency and meditative humour.’ John Bayley ‘An odyssey, from Ireland to East, West and back again: stemming from and returning to an intellectual tradition which takes in Montaigne and Turgenev as well as Swift and Shaw – It moves like a searchlight, to take in and illuminate the largest questions imaginable.’ R.F. Foster ‘To follow Hubert Butler is to enjoy the hair-raising frisson of history passing by.’ Eoghan Harris