Soft Cop, Hard Cop

• Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture by Terry Eagleton
  Verso, 355 pp, £18.95, May 1995, ISBN 1 85984 932 6

Terry Eagleton’s new book, not merely a series of studies in Irish culture but one of the most noteworthy contributions to it of recent times, realigns Irish writing within contemporary debates about cultural politics, adhering to the particularity of the Irish situation without becoming mired in its bitter complexities.