“... apart from interpretations of it in social, racial or sexual terms. Given such interpretations, Terry Eagleton said recently, ‘the study of English literature might just be defensible, even important.’ That ‘just’ is especially felicitous. The response to the kind of question Kermode asks himself, it is hard to say how seriously, is that in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... English has a problem with the morally bad. Terry Eagleton reports his son’s approving reaction when told that his father was writing a book on evil: ‘Wicked!’ Words like ‘wicked’, ‘bad’, ‘nasty’, ‘filthy’, ‘naughty’ have all fallen prey to ironic subversion. The word ‘evil’ is something of an exception: the vestry romps of errant priests and MPs’ abject grubbing for baksheesh fail to do it justice ...”

“... trousers ... Tuf boots’. Acting as MC for the occasion, Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry Eagleton, ‘small, solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit ...”

“... Terry Eagleton’s books have been getting shorter recently. It is eight years since he offered to re-situate literary criticism on the ‘alternative terrain of scientific knowledge’; three since, self-canonised, he included his name in a list of major Marxist theoreticians of the 20th century. The Function of Criticism is a history of three centuries of English criticism in little more than a hundred pages ...”

“... of assumptions about art, or rather of the concept of the aesthetic, is the argument of Terry Eagleton’s long and brilliant book. With great energy and much good cheer it offers a full and tendentious study of the concept. The journey is enjoyable and the terminus rather magnificent. Nothing becomes the book more than its concluding ...”

“... verse seems to have the same shape, with the poem moving towards the ironic, downbeat shape that Terry Eagleton has called a ‘pulled punch’. The pulled punch – the resonant and suggestive dying fall – is a common enough ending in short fiction too, and it’s exactly the ending Mary Gordon consistently avoids in her new collection of ...”

“... In Exiles and Emigrés (1970) Terry Eagleton argued that modern British culture had proved incapable of producing a major writer who could analyse society as a whole. It had collapsed into a ‘withered empiricism’. And English poetry in this century has seemed to many to confirm this analysis, the dominant voice being one of cautious ‘common sense’ tinged with a wistful conservatism                             an immense load Of self-neutralising moral and social qualities, Above all, Circumspection ...”

“... forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s patter, increasingly presents himself as the sensible Marxist alternative to toothless and ornate theory in America and continental Europe. And John Bayley, with his hospitable style and gift for ...”

“... revives, a funeral turned into a voodoo carnival. Similar things are not unknown in Ireland, where Terry Eagleton’s self-consciously carnivalesque first novel is set. Saints and Scholars begins with a drably journalistic reconstruction of the execution of James Connolly at Kilmainham gaol in 1916. The opening pages are clumsily written – Connolly’s ...”

“... or even neutrals. Many of the tributes to Williams after his death struck the same sort of note. Terry Eagleton, a Williams disciple, reviewing Resources of Hope for the Observer, stroked his audience with certain ritual keywords, just as Williams always did: One of Williams’s most striking qualities as a writer is a rare combination of reason and ...”

“... of teaching the canon. Collini notes the coincidence that another ‘gifted comic writer’, Terry Eagleton, provided the most influential account we have of the rise of English – seen by Eagleton as a pernicious mystification serving the interests of the ruling class – in the first chapter of his bestseller ...”

“... of classless bonhomie and darts in the village pub’. Another contemporary Marxist intellectual, Terry Eagleton, wrote his PhD thesis about Carpenter, but it has never been published, perhaps fitting untidily with the cleansed, scientific precisions of anti-humanist literary criticism of the kind Eagleton now ...”

“... of most of the contributors is unequivocal. Not only is it wrong to accuse Derrida of being (as Terry Eagleton puts it) ‘grossly unhistorical’: but it is virtually impossible to find any thinker whose method is adequately ‘historical’ in the way that Derrida’s is. It is difficult to know where exactly this leaves us. All of the contributors ...”

“... however, voices have been raised in dissent against the swollen ‘body’ industry, notably by Terry Eagleton, for whom the endless discussion of the body remains a tiresome and dubiously fruitful extrapolation of the obvious which – with its interest in violent and pitiful subjection – promotes a neurotic and defeatist view of power in history ...”