Peter McDonald

Tom Paulin, in his Diary (LRB, 24 August), notices what is hard to miss in Northern Ireland these days, when he mentions the media campaign pushing certain ‘feelgood’ aspects of the ‘peace process’, with its images of tourist beauty-spots and playing children, and its Van Morrison soundtrack. Like Paulin, I am uneasy about the assumptions behind a campaign like this, and find the television...

SIR: It is reassuring to know that Denis Donoghue, reviewing Louis MacNeice’s Selected Literary Criticism (LRB, 23 April), shares enough of the ‘currently renewed interest’ in that poet to admit that it is time his reputation was allowed to escape from Auden’s shadow. It is more puzzling, however, to read Donoghue’s protests against MacNeice’s status as a ‘precursor’ of contemporary...