Hubert Butler: 7 books

The Appleman and the Poet, the fifth volume of Hubert Butler's essays, completes a thirty-year odyssey embarked upon by The Lilliput Press in 1984. Our flagship author has finally come home, welcomed by Fintan O'Toole in his foreword: One of the great joys of these essays is the discovery of sentences...

The finest and most penetrating essayist this country has produced this century ... there is not a dull page in this civilized and witty book.' - The Irish Times A third volume of essays - autobiographical, polemical, political, exploratory - by the most distinctive Irish writer of the age, in the...

Opening Hubert Butler's book of essays is like discovering gold. He has all the essayists's gifts: a clear, strong prose, a fascination with everyday affairs and their significance sub specie aeternitatis, a readiness to generalize, the ability to digress without wondering from the point, to inform...

"During the twenty years from the early 1950s to the [1972] publication of Ten Thousand Saints Hubert Butler amassed, by hand, every possible reference to every possible saint in the Irish corpus in Irish and Latin ... His understanding of Ireland as part of the bigger picture of prehistoric...

With Escape from the Anthill, his first volume of essays, Hubert Butler became universally acclaimed as one of Ireland's most enduring and distinctive writers. In this long-awaited sequel he writes with emphasis on Europe and travel in Russia, China, the Adriatic and America during the mid-century....

In The Land of Nod is the fourth and final volume of Hubert Butler's essays and crowns a remarkable literary odyssey. As Neal Ascherson writes: 'When the first collection appeared in 1985 he was already an old man/ His fame began to spread across his native Ireland and then across the world. By the...

An important study of the dynamics behind Tone's ideal, which disentangles the roots of racialism and nationalism in Ireland, and questions the causes of division between North and South. Butler contends - with precision and passion - that the way forward lies through an understanding of the past and a return to the world of small-scale and personal dimensions.